My first real encounter with computers was back in 1980, when a friend showed me a programme he had written on his Acorn Atom, a simple Basic programme that allowed the computer to give a series of random answers to statements or questions inputted by the user. Data was stored on audio tape. It was my first introduction to arrays and strings. I credit him with arousing my interest in computing.Malcolm now writes electronic music and you can catch his site here.

Since then I have tried to teach myself Basic, HTML and a host of other goodies.Some efforts have been more successful than others.For several years now, I have been using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Premiere and Flash and each new addition means more learning and quite often more frustration.

Over those years the internet has changed out of all recognition, and having rather late in the day, bought my own web space again, I decided to have a serious look at blogging and vlogging.New skills were required and I am afraid I balked at the idea of teaching myself PHP and any of the other scripting languages.I wanted to get my new site up and running. It was now that Google introduced me to a whole new world called “Open Source”.The majority of this site is now put together with Dreamweaver, WordPress and the Weaver II theme. My thanks go therefore to the following people and organisations in particular:

• WordPress.org & all who contribute to the forums
• Bruce E. Wample who designed the Weaver II theme
• Alex Tingle & Stig Ulfsby – who designed Event Calendar 3; the only Event Calendar I have ever been able to get working.

Please visit their pages, their work is an inspiration to all web masters and I hope that I will do their designs justice.

The Weaver theme has now been superceded by Weaver II, which involved another learning curve as there are so many options. One of the joys of this theme is its ability to work with mobile devices and  tablets. There is an excellent article explaining their approach on their blog here. My site has never looked better on my Blackberry! I have tried to retain the basic look of the site from Weaver with a few tweaks. I have also added some new plugins and deleted others which are surplus to requirements, housekeeping I don’t often get round to.

 (Updated June 2012)