Websites
I’ve been making websites since 2003, when I released DN Online to an unsuspecting world. Over the next two years, I used a similar format to shove various bits of text and photos of minority interest online.
The first ‘real’ site I got involved in was the United Reformed Church North Western Synod, which I took over in January 2005. By the time I stood down as webmaster in September 2007, I’d completely rewritten the site, and cleaned up the theme a bit, too.
Between 2005 and 2007, I ended up creating one or two other sites. “The Reading Web”, a site to help and encourage secondary school children with their reading, was my A-Level Computing project.
During my three years at Magdalen College, Oxford (October 2006 to July 2009) I served a year as JCR Computer Rep, writing the new Rooms Database and installing the Planet amongst other things. I was particularly pleased with the my hall menus parser, a time saving script which you can read more about. I also fixed a few bugs and added automatic reminder emails and fines to our Wineshop DVD catalogue.
I put together a site for a student performance of Checkov’s The Cherry Orchard taking place in Oxford in early 2007 – rather than make a design for it, I took the easy way out and used one from OSWD.
In 2008/9, I wrote the backend for the College Commemoration Ball site. Andrew Godwin did the design, and I did a talk to OGN 12 about the software.
This site
Finally, of course, there’s this website, which I set up in May 2007. I’d avoided having an online presence of my own until then for fear of joining the large number of people on the WWW who have nothing to say, but feel a need to say it anyway. I do my best to ensure that posts to my blog are potentially useful to other people, although I occasionally break my own rules in order to rant about the inadequacies of British public transport, the unfairness of life, etc.
It should go without saying that all the pages of this site use valid XHTML and valid CSS, and that the feeds are valid RSS 2.0 or Atom. Admittedly, some documents do sometimes end up failing validation due to incorrectly encoded characters appearing in posts – if you spot a validation error, please let me know.
The site is powered by WordPress, and is now hosted on my VPS at Splice. Many thanks to Martin for hosting it in the early days, originally on Lithium and later on Cyclone. Thanks also to Andrew for hosting my secondary DNS during the Slicehost years, December 2007 to July 2009.
