My presence on the web began in 2000 and grew steadily as a series of hand coded, static pages,until late 2005, when I redid my site in PHP.

Now in its second incarnation, this website is powered by a combination of Open Source software and technologies including the Joomla content manager running on an Apache web server on the Red Hat Linux platform.

These days I tend to write most of the travel pieces on my Psion as I travel. I then edit, format, and post them using Jedit, VIM, or Emacs on my Linux machine or Mellel on my Mac.

The home page uses the ms_thinking_green template and the rest of the site uses the madeyourweb template. The font in the masthead is Joehand2, and that picture is from Mahe in the Seychelles Islands.

All content and images are my own, as are mistakes, ignorant comments, and misrepresentations: let me know where I am off track and I will most happily correct them.

I wrote up some thoughts about the strengths and weaknesses of Joomla on this web page. And if you're considering taking the Joomla plunge yourself, take a look at this article I wrote about the installation and configuration of Joomla, for more.

Lastly, this site remains entirely ad-free. The world wide web has enough folks trying to scrape together a "life" on ad clicks. I'm not hawking anything except (very obviously), my own two books. If you're looking for contextual advertising, simply navigate away from this site.