This website started as a means for me to communicate with friends and family scattered all over the world. I found myself writing the same thing in emails to different people, so I figured I could just write my news once and tell everyone where to look.

But the web is public, so that means that anything I put here can be read by anyone in the world. That tends to cramp my writing style a bit — I find myself using something midway between the informality of my normal casual style and the formality (and tendency towards pompousness) of a "letter to the editor".

I'm still working out the balance, and if some of what I've got here seems a bit stilted, you should understand that I probably think so too.

(I'm particularly conscious of this in my pages on the World Trade Center attacks — it's very difficult to write something that conveys the appropriate depth of feeling, and isn't just a statement of the bleeding obvious.)

I run my browser with a relatively narrow window — I used to have it about 600 pixels wide, but that became somewhat restrictive so I increased it to about 800. That may seem strange when screens have been much bigger than that for many years now, but I prefer to leave room on my screen for other things, like another browser window, or email, or a media player, or any of a number of things.

It's very difficult to create screen content that looks good on widely differing screen layouts, so I have decided to enforce a specific display width for my website. The width that I have chosen is 640 — this is less than my usual window width, and a lot narrower than most screens, but it's convenient for my layout, and when PDAs expand to this width (they're currently mostly 320) it will be perfect.

There are precedents for the use of a fixed width — the BBC website (which should probably be moved to the top of the News list since it is my preferred source for news) does the same. And many websites try to enforce a wider format.

I think my pages look better this way. I'm sorry if you disagree. Feel free to use the right-hand side of the screen for whatever you want, like a Skype window, or a media player, or...

For several years now this site was hosted on a shared web hosting facility provided by Verio. But after two protracted outages I finally lost patience with Verio and started looking for a new hosting facility.

I initially switched to 256domains.com — a low-cost reseller for the large domain registration and hosting company eNom. But I found the level of support from 256domains.com inadequate for my needs (I suspect it's a one-person operation) and their email services were mainly intended for email forwarding rather than providing the full POP and SMTP service I had expected.

So now I've switched to GoDaddy – a company more famous for its television advertising during the American Football “Super Bowl” than for anything else. So far so good — support has been excellent and the transfer went very smoothly. And the cost is only very slightly highly than at 256domains.com, and dramatically less than at Verio.

Also, I was never very comfortable with the fact that hosting at 256domains.com was on Windows. GoDaddy offers a choice between Windows and Linux and I chose Linux — partly because of a personal prejudice against Windows and partly because I think I understand what's going on better with Linux.

All photographs on this web site are “click-through” — that means you can click on any of the small "thumbnail" images to get a larger version, usually 1024 x 680.

You can also save the image without loading it in your browser – just right-click on the thumbnail and select “Save Target As...” (in Internet Explorer) or “Save Link As...” (in Firefox or Netscape).

These pages are written in XML, and converted to HTML by XSLT. That's how they all get a consistent appearance and the same contents in the left and right columns. I use the JAXP XSLT processor, and I have written my own program to automate the transform process.