Almost everything you see on this site is copyright Mark Moxon, from the writing and photos to the XHTML and Perl scripts. Unauthorised duplication is against the law – not to mention downright irritating after all the hours of effort I've put into creating this site – but if you'd like obtain permission to reproduce something from my website, please see Using My Content on Your Site. The only parts of this site I didn't create myself are:
In implementing the dynamic HTML, I've used the fantastic jQuery framework.
The Guestbook is powered by the excellent phpBB.
The icons on the home page are from Mark James's wonderful silk icons set.
Everything else you see is my own, original work... or, to put it another way, you should blame me.
How I Created My Site
Over the years, I've used the following products to create and maintain this site for your enjoyment and delectation:
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HTML: The first version of this site was written by hand in Zap, and the second version was created with HoTMetaL Pro. Versions three and four saw me returning to hand-coding, this time with the excellent BBEdit, and for versions five and six – this version – I again hand-coded everything, but this time in TextWrangler. This site has been validated to the XHTML 1.0 and CSS standards by W3C's validation service, and has Level AA Conformance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. For more information on the latter, see the accessibility statement.
The site has been tested on various versions of Mac OS and Windows, and on various browsers. All functionality has been designed to degrade gracefully and in an accessible manner on browsers that do not support DHTML.
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Perl, PHP and JavaScript: I wrote the Search, Email to a Friend and Random Tale scripts using that wonderfully obtuse language Perl, and I wrote the Photo Library, Image and Map pages in the somewhat friendlier language PHP. Dynamic HTML is implemented in event-driven JavaScript, using the fantastic jQuery framework, and I've made a number of enhancements to the excellent phpBB forum system to implement my Guestbook.
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Tales: Up to mid-2002 I used to write all my articles on location using an Acorn Pocket Book II; I would then port them to EasiWriter and later Word, before giving up on this route and switching to the HTML editors above. Since mid-2002 I've written all my articles on location using a Palm m125 and a Palm Keyboard, writing them manually in XHTML; I then copy them to my Mac and use TextWrangler to add all the page furniture.
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Photos: Most of my early photos were taken on my trusty Minolta X-300 SLR and were scanned with a Canon N670U scanner. After my Minolta died halfway through my trip to Morocco I bought a Pentax MZ6, which I used to photograph West Africa, and for my Land's End to John o'Groats walk I finally went digital with a Fujifilm FinePix F401. For my tubewalk I graduated to an Olympus SP-550 UZ, which suits me very nicely.
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Site Design: I designed the site and created all the graphics myself (except for the icons on the home page) initially using ArtWorks, and then using the wonderful Corel Xara. The buttons that appeared on earlier versions of this site started life in Xara WebStyle, but they also ended up in Corel Xara for greater control. I finally dropped all graphical buttons in version 4 of the site.
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Hardware: The first version of this site was created on a StrongARM-powered Acorn Risc PC, the second on a Pentium PC running Windows NT, the third on a combination of a PC and an Apple PowerBook G3, the fourth purely on an Apple PowerBook G3, the fifth on a 20" Apple iMac G5, and the sixth (this one) on a 24" Apple iMac Intel Core 2 Duo. I like variety.
Site History
Here's a very brief (and rather incomplete) history of this website.
December 2003: Site launched.
September 2004: phpBB-based Guestbook launched.
November 2004: Random tale button added.
February 2005: Searchable photo library added, covering 220 walking photos.
March 2005: eBook of the London Loop published.
November 2005: Site recoded to be Level AA accessible.
December 2005: Dates added to all photographs.
January 2006: RSS feed launched.
November 2006: 220 large images added.
December 2006: Home page slideshow added.
February 2007: Desktop wallpaper and screen saver added.
February 2007: Accessibility improved and accessibility statement added.
March 2007: Fast multi-site search added.
July 2007: Capital Ring added.
August 2007: More London Loop photos added
January 2009: New design launched.
June 2009: Size of images increased, photo library redesigned.
April 2011: eBooks updated with latest content and released in EPUB (iPad/iPhone) and MOBI (Kindle) formats.
June 2011: Search extended to cover Guestbook posts.
August 2011: Next/previous links added to large images, to enable you to step through sets of images more easily.
September 2011: Improved page loading time significantly by implementing Google's web performance best practices.
