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.

In the good old days I wrote most of the travel pieces on my Psion as I traveled. Since it went to gadget heaven, I've been at somewhat of a loss: my tablet is still not a writing tool. 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. The title font is Hayden and the signature font is Giuliano, both available from softmaker.com. All content and images are my own except as noted. The mistakes, ignorant comments, and misrepresentations are usually mine as well: take issue with something? Get in touch.

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 three books. If you're looking for contextual advertising, simply navigate away from this site. Call me a curmudgeon, but I remember when the Internet was a forum for intelligent, motivated exchange. It's busy morphing into something I don't like, but it's not clear yet what. Television, probably.

I've changed the masthead from time to time. Here are its various incarnations:

Masthead, 2000-2005

Masthead, 2005-2008

Masthead, 2009-2010

Masthead, 2010-2012

Masthead, 2012-Present