Confessions of a Web geek         December 2006                                                    Back to Tail Corn Reports

The village website – my latest obsession! Sad, I know. But there we are. Because the computer is handy, I check the website straight after breakfast and intermittently throughout the day and then just before I go to bed. I like to see who is visiting and what pages they are watching. There’s a faithful band out there who look in most days and many others who regularly see at least the front page. I like to track distant visitors as well.

That’s retirement for you. For the first time you can make the time to organise your photo collection, revamp the garden, and follow a whim. You also have time to neglect wilfully all the things you loath – like decorating, cleaning the windows, and clearing the ditch.

There is, of course, much more to life than website-tweaking. The grandchildren keep me off the computer very efficiently and I have no laptop on Moonpenny, our narrowboat. Nor do we have telly on Moonpenny. So the boat, which started life as a necessary “shop-free” zone back in the bad old work days, now serves as an IT-free zone – and a good thing too.

Fortunately, I have not succumbed to Sky TV. The combination of keeping up to speed with the website and watching our brave cricketers might just turn me into a complete zombie. As it is, I can still force myself out of the hot seat just about enough to keep the garden tamed.

Considering the communicative nature of the internet, I find managing the website is a strangely solitary occupation. I am unreasonably gratified by the smallest bit of encouragement. Very few people actually make contact. It is as if the website is fully automated and therefore faceless. So I do enjoy the Statistics Counter and the tale it tells. The Recent Visitor Map is great fun. I still expect to spot the visitor putting the wheelie bin out!

My web-making skills are largely confined to FrontPage and a little HTML coding now and again. But I have found that the answers to most problems reside somewhere on Google (once you have found the right questions) and so I have experimented just a bit. The trailing Santa cursor on the Christmas page was downloaded for free and pasted in as two pages of complicated coding. I still hanker after a zoom and fade slide-show but am aware that some computers can’t accept such frills – so I have a good excuse for leaving well alone.

Collecting material has not been a problem so far. Jill Marshall sends me pictures on a “use if you like” basis for which I am grateful. I hope you will make sure I know of changes or additions I should make. Occasionally I discover a link that no longer works and wonder if anyone else spotted it. I hope you would write and tell me if you had.

I wonder if there is a youngish person in the village who would like to discuss the website with me from time to time. While I have become rather possessive about it, I ought to be responsive to constructive suggestions. Perhaps there is someone itching to tinker a bit. I warn you, though, it can be habit-forming.

David Farnell  14th December 2006  (From Tail Corn Winter 2007)