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?)
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 are available here. These are on a broad range of topics — mostly about web design and development — but off-topic posts are scattered about.
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.
places show up here. Each has left a mark sufficient to prompt a post. Some of them originate from our teaching website in France (with its less complicated language) and these are listed after a grey horizontal line. Some of these posts are vehicles for pixels, some for words; some posts have both working in harmony.
volumes do indeed sit on my shelves and I have read them all — bar the odd chapter here or there. They have helped me to stay out of the classroom and have nourished me immeasurably. I’ve not used a star system to set one above another, but my comments alongside each may help perform that function. Some of these books I find — and still find — to be quite simply invaluable.
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.
A spread of technology has been used to launch these websites, from vanilla HTML and CSS to the ASP.NET platform to Drupal 6 and 7 and, eventually, to Backdrop CMS.
software projects cling on tenaciously here. This stuff was done prior to my designing and building websites, enabling me to learn how to listen to clients and to design systems that responded to their detailed requirements. The following applications are software projects (not website projects) that demonstrate some of these qualities. Written in either VB.NET or ToolBook Asymetrix/Click2Learn ToolBook Developer (the first Windows-based multimedia software authoring system) they were — with one exception — front-ends to databases. The majority of them were eLearning or course-management applications.
Welcome to the pre-internet museum!