This page is an experiment: to lay out links to the majority of the content added to the site since it took this format and to do so on one page. Content has been grouped, styled and highlighted in pursuit of improved readability.

The surprise of doing an audit such as this is that it encourages one to adopt something of a curator’s perspective - tweaking the display to reveal patterns and themes. (Did I mention anything about icebergs?)

Main content pages

5
a continuing journey of diverging interests

pages of this site (as distinct from other types of content) are listed here; about the same quantity again was culled in a radical pruning several years back.

Blog posts

32

blog posts are available here. These are on a broad range of topics - mostly about web design and development - but off-topic posts are scattered about.

Painting with light - John Blakemore

Bridget Riley at the Hayward Gallery

There are too many honey bees in the garden

Farewell Drupal 8. Hello Backdrop CMS

The Marmalade hoverfly

Field can contain HTML

Bellini's St. Francis in the Desert

Reader View

Extinct & Endangered

Website accessibility

Akhmatova, Yevtushenko and Putin

Flowers in a glass vase

Samuel Beckett's hands

Website building resources

Albertinelli's The Creation and Fall of Man

Targeting a menu link from two levels down

Truth sidelined by tribal epistemology

Strengthening your passwords

Mapping in Backdrop CMS

Help is at hand

Ten steps to greening your website

Drupal version 8: loyalty or farewell?

Can a web page have too much white space?

No Man is an Island

Adding a scroll indicator

The chestnut leaf breakout

Nature therapy and VE Day

La garde-robe

Surrounded by orchids

The BBC Sounds app and the onTabletFling() event

Meet the Soays

Good reading

Reading is a silver spoon you can’t be born with. For some, the ability never develops or does so only through struggle. It’s only natural then to share the fruits of reading fluency freely and with passion. It’s what bookworms - and English teachers, practising or retired - do.

A few of these posts are shamefully short whilst others have veered towards being essays. You have been warned! Get in touch if you think I’ve misread - or even missed - something.

The Peregrine

J. A. Baker

Riders in the Chariot

Patrick White

Foolproof - Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity

Sander van der Linden

Voss

Patrick White

Endless Forms - The Secret World of Wasps

Seirian Sumner

The Tree of Man

Patrick White

Words Onscreen - the Fate of Reading in a Digital World

Naomi S. Baron

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville

Why Climate Breakdown Matters

Rupert Read

The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Road to Oxiana

Robert Byron

Underland

Robert Macfarlane

Reclaiming Conversation - The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

Sherry Turkle

The Lives of the Surrealists

Desmond Morris

Regenesis

George Monbiot

Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

Samuel Beckett

Ulysses

James Joyce

How It Is

Samuel Beckett

Watt

Samuel Beckett

How Civil Wars Start And How to Stop Them

Barbara F. Walter

Wilding: The return of nature to a British farm

Isabella Tree

Murphy

Samuel Beckett

LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media

P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking

Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse

Dave Goulson

Reader, Come Home - the Reading Brain in a Digital World

Maryanne Wolf

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Muriel Barbery

Proust and the Squid - the Story and Science of the Reading Brain

Maryanne Wolf

We are Bellingcat

Eliot Higgins

Shorelands Summer Diary

C.F. Tunnicliffe

Entangled Life

Merlin Sheldrake

Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy

Michael McCarthy

The Eye of the Storm

Patrick White

The Captain and the Glory

Dave Eggers

The Old Ways

Robert Macfarlane

The Cockroach

Ian McEwan

The Clock of the Long Now - time and responsibility

Stewart Brand

The Vivisector

Patrick White

In The Rainforest

Catherine Caufield

The Solid Mandala

Patrick White

Places

56

places show up here. Each has left a mark sufficient to prompt a post. Some of these (from 2012 — 2015) originate from our old teaching website in France (with its less complicated language). Some of these posts are vehicles for pixels, some for words; some posts have both working in harmony.

Bostadh

The Uig Sands Chessmen

Eilean Glas Lighthouse

House for an Art Lover

Wells Cathedral's Chapter House steps

The Hill House

The Cosmic House

Lacock Abbey

The Church of St. Thomas Becket, Fairfield

Kew Gardens and the Temperate House

The Collector Earl’s Garden

The Kintyre peninsula

The Spanish Chestnut Avenue

The Kintyre shoreline

Old Soar Manor

The Glasgow School of Art 2018

Carlyle's House

Great Chalfield Manor

Penshurst Place

The Giant's Causeway

The Queen's House Greenwich

Downhill Demesne and Mussenden Temple

Claydon House

Belfast's Murals and Peace Walls

The Old Royal Naval College's Painted Hall

Rathlin Island

Oxburgh Hall

Lancing College Chapel

Chastleton House

Casa Batlló, Barcelona

Broughton Castle

Casa Milà, "La Pedrera", Barcelona

The Isle of Coll

La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

Petworth House

The dance in moonlight

Ightham Mote

Standen House

The i360, Brighton

Montacute House

Lincoln Cathedral

Barrington Court

Hardwick Hall

East Coker

Stokesay Castle

Auch cathedral

Sezincote

Trapeharde's wheel of time

St Botolph's Church, Hardham

Lewes Crescent

Haddon Hall

The Maquis de Meilhan

St. Celynin's Church at Llangelynnin

Bostah Iron Age Village

Parham House

The Glasgow School of Art

French archive posts

30

posts about living and teaching in rural France gather a little bit of virtual dust here. From 2010 onwards, until we returned to England in 2016, we enjoyed working with French adults and youngsters who came to stay with us at our house in the Gers to work on their English. With both of us being qualified teachers, we like to think that we made something of an impact.

This experience was immensely rewarding for Jane and I, not least because it gave us insight into the value various French people placed upon learning English. We also made many friends, some of whom we continue to see even though we now no longer live in France.

We advertised the business through our own website, sejour-anglais.com, now no longer live. We also developed a collection of blog posts which we hoped would allow potential clients to get a feel for what it might be like staying with us.

In my capacity as a website designer, this part of the business had its own appeal as I could see how powerful an informal blog can be when attached to the more formal pages of a business website. Sometimes these English language blog pages would rank on page one of Google France search results, an unintended consequence of using HTML without tricks or paid-for advertising.

For sentimental reasons, a selection of these French-based blog posts has found a final resting place in this section of the site.

The Booth Museum of Natural History

Brighton's Royal Pavilion

Arundel Castle

Grasses, names and history

Footprints from the past

Markings in wood

Albert and the miniscule worlds

A van with a difference

An explosion of colour in Auch

Black, yellow and wonderful

A flame-proof amphibian

The European tree frog

Asparagus - the king of vegetables

The golden lady in our kitchen

Crossing the Tarn in style

Competition - caption for cat photos

Le Musée des Jacobins

In the footsteps of d'Artagnan

What course do we use?

Spring has arrived

Keeping an eye out for birds

Upside-down cake

Curry - a favourite in England

Googling

Pronouncing words that end in 's'

English adjective order

The Bassoues donjon