"Websites are like gardens," wrote the BMJ’s Richard Smith. "Turn your back on them
for a few weeks and they’re overrun with weeds in the form of out of
date coming events and hypertext links leading nowhere." It’s been rather longer than a few weeks, but I’m finally knuckling down to do some gardening over at my SFF site, to update the style of the website, and to consolidate and update all the various pages I have written over the years and still consider fit to print. It was actually 1997 that I applied myself to finding out what HTML was all about, perusing books on HTML in the reading room of the alas-now-closed National Science Library of Edinburgh, and built my first web-page, with the help of my notes and the NCSA’s classic "Beginner’s Guide to HTML", so that almost qualifies me as a senior netizen. The growth of technologies and creativity has been extraordinary – I certainly can’t claim to have kept up. Unfortunately, corruption, exploitation and pollution have also grown apace, but that’s a topic for another post.