About this site

I've had a personal website for a while now, and recently I decided I needed a change. My old website had originally been a project built for a Masters degree (an MCOMMS from Victoria University here in Wellington). Over the course of four years I've had around 2000 visitors from 25 countries visit my homepage. Most of these people actually arrived there from search engine results giving them the Sumo and Dry Stone Walls pages.

But lately it's been becoming a pain to maintain. With the arrival of Bella in September 2000 I needed to be able to make revisions to the site quickly to accommodate friends and family in various parts of the world that wanted up-to-date news and pictures. I really don't have lots of time to spend on this sort of thing anymore, so I needed a solution that would still allow me to keep the pages current without taking up too much time.

After some investigation, I've settled on a piece of software called Radio UserLand. Basically it is supposed to take the technical drudgery out of creating webpages, leaving web page authors free to dream up the words and place the pictures. Plus I wanted to try out writing a "weblog". It's the 'in' thing, you know. :-)

It's not quite as easy as all of that. There's a lot of stuff that has yet to make the transition from the old site to this one, and there's still a few rough edges in the presentation. But it is much easier to add little snippets of commentary to the website each day... and hopefully I'll continue to do this.

Site Layout

In addition to the day pages, there are also other pages, called "Stories", which contain longer articles, rantings, or think stuff. These may be accessed through the link under the calendar on the homepage.

Also under the calendar on the homepage is a little orange XML button. This gives the URL for the XML version of the page (as opposed to the HTML version you see at present). This XML version - think of it as a newsfeed - can be used by other applications to subscribe to my homepage. For example, users of My Netscape and Radio Userland can can subscribe to others' weblogs or news sites. At the moment I use this feature of Radio Userland to subscribe to a couple other weblogs as well as some news websites. That's why you'll sometimes see me reposting news stories - they've come to me through my subscription.

The little envelope icon on each page is a way to send me email. It links to a web form.

I can also define separate parts of the website to have a different look and feel. In this case I've give Bella's part of the site quite a different look. I hope to be able to make it even more 'hers' in future.

And that's more or less how it works.