One of my favourite ever things was using Geocities to make my very first website, way back when. I know how much of a dinosaur that makes me, trust me.
When I started that, I had no real idea of how to write HTML, far less CSS. It was all learn as you go, and I loved picking up every new little trick or tag. It's been a long time since I've had to use any sort of code, so building this feels like a glorious leap back into the past—one that I'm loving.
If you want to give building a website from scratch a go, this site is on Neocities, and you can make one too. They have tutorials for HTML and CSS coding - skills that seem pretty dinosaur-ish today, but they're still fun (and there are links to the tutorials down the bottom of the page).
When I started that site, I had no idea what it was going to be about (it ended up being a mish-mash of X-Files, Battle of the Planets fanfic, Pern/Dragonriders fanfic and Australiana). This one's going to be a bit more organised (I hope) and be a running track of what I read. I'm also a photographer, so I'm going to show off some pics too. Some will be from my archive, some will be newer. Pics will also usually be links to my Flickr page (and to my Redbubble page if it's something I've uploaded there).
Updated the favicon from the previously blurry thing (I've even forgotten what it was) to a little pile o' books, since that's the way the site's moving these days.
More book reviews posted—I remain up to date, at least so far, yay me. I have also decided on a reading mission for 2026, which is to conquer Mount To-Be-Read: more info on the books page.
Created The 2026 Mission: Conquer Mt To-Be-Read, with a list of all the books in my Queue collection plus the physical pile that make up Mount To-Be-Read. The goal is to reduce that pile down to 20 or so, or less if I can, this year.
After a major slog, I am fully caught up on book reviews. I've also adapted the Books page to reset it for 2026's reading. All of the book reviews (all 83 of them) have been moved to the 2025 books page, which also has some stats and thoughts about the year's reading. I'm hoping to be at least a bit better behaved when it comes to reviews for 2026's reads!
No other major plans for the page, except that I may go back and finesse the stats a bit on the 2025 page. This depends on the info contained in the Storygraph download that's on the way; if it's useful, I'll take the data to somewhere like Datawrapper and make some snazzy graphs.
I've removed the Assorted page; I very rarely updated it, and even more rarely actually looked at it. Bye-bye Assorted. Likewise, I've deleted the blog page because I blog infrequently; instead I'm moving to this monthly update, and I'll set up a page for updates more than a month or two old.
The first reviews for 2026 are up, for a couple of Mick Herron books.
These were what we used to navigate the web Back In The Day TM before search engines.
