Our Five Websites:
their Purpose, Structure and Origin
Barry and Margaret Williamson
March 2018
Introduction
Over the last twelve years we have developed five websites for different
reasons and purposes. Here we attempt to explain what each website is about,
how it arose, what its purpose is and something about its structure.
Here are the websites, in chronological order:
MagBaz Travels
www.magbaztravels.com
Started March 2005
On the left are Barry and Margaret at
9,240 ft (2800 m) on the Cime de la Bonette, the highest road in the French
Alps, in September 2004
During the night before we bought a laptop in the nearby bazaar, our 22nd-floor
room in a Johor Bahru hotel swayed in the after-shocks still being felt from
the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami. Other tremors in our lives followed,
this time with pleasant after-shocks, as we began to think about how to use the
new laptop to develop a website for storing and sharing the articles, travel
logs and photographs accumulated in ten years of full-time travel.
We had arrived at the southern tip of Malaysia after self-drive hire-car
journeys from Bangkok, with side trips into Cambodia, Laos and Burma, and were
poised to cross the causeway into Singapore for a flight to Perth in Western
Australia. There we collected a hired
Mercedes Sprinter-based motorhome, returning it in Brisbane 3-months later
on the other side of the continent.
Australians Rebecca and Kevin (Bec & Kev in the Aussie vernacular) are
professional computer programmers, now settled on a croft in the Isle of Skye; in
those days Bec worked from their
home in the tropical rain forest above Cairns in northern Queensland, while
Kev managed databases for the Cairns Police. We had first met them on 2
September 1997, when we shared an evening together
on the campsite in Alexandroupolis in far north-eastern Greece. They had just
driven their VW Kombi Campervan down from the border with Bulgaria, we were about
to cross the nearer border into Turkey. Having kept in touch and finding
ourselves on their home soil early in 2005, we began an email discussion on
possible website designs. They proposed a branching design, rather than the
much more common and simpler structure of the linear blog with its limited menu
system and entries that have to be read backwards from the top.
And so MagBazTravels was born on 25 March 2005, taking its first faltering steps
thanks to campsite and library internet access as we drove across Australia. Our
week-long visit to Bec & Kev's wooden house-on-stilts from 12 June 2005
provided many tutorials for us and put the final touches to the website.
Retaining this basic structure, it has just grown and grown, now with 934 travel articles
(220 of them by 78
fellow travellers), 127 motorhoming
articles, 102
cycling articles, 800 readers'
comments, 64
useful links, 45
recommended travellers' websites, 311 travel-related
quotations, countless links, even more photographs
and much else besides.
MagBazTravels functions at three levels: Sections, within which there are
Categories, within which there are Content Articles. This gives almost
unlimited scope for expansion but always within a very efficient menu system.
For example when Ian Manzie recently sent a 4,000-word illustrated account of a
motorhome tour of two new countries, it was a matter of moments to add two more
Categories 'Georgia' and 'Armenia' within the Section 'Countries' with the
possibility of adding more articles within either category in the future.
Holly Bank
http://hollybank.magbaztravels.com
Started August 2007
On the left is the wall plaque at Holly
Bank's former site
Barry's former colleague Peter Frankland requested this website, as a history
and a memorial to the former Huddersfield College of Education (Technical) on
the 60th anniversary of its founding. Bec and Kev designed the website as an
offshoot from MagBazTravels and Barry added the content that is there today.
Peter took up the role of editor, although he did not find it possible to add anything.
However, the site remains open for further development.
In 1947, one of only four centres in England for technical teacher training was
started in Huddersfield by the charismatic Alexander MacLennan ('Mac'), using rooms
in the local technical college. In 1965, the newly-named Huddersfield College
of Education (Technical) moved into purpose-built
buildings with a 7-storey student hostel on Holly Bank Road in a leafy
Huddersfield suburb, thereafter becoming affectionately known simply as 'Holly
Bank'. Having gained postgraduate trained teacher status there, and after
teaching physics in three colleges, Barry later returned to work at Holly Bank
(including spells in India, Malawi and Iraq) until early retirement beckoned. Margaret
also worked in the further education sector in Sheffield and Huddersfield, with
a postgraduate Certificate in Education from Holly Bank.
Holly Bank itself became the 'Faculty of Education' in the Huddersfield
Polytechnic in 1974, whereupon MacLennan wisely retired. Since 1992 it has been
telescoped into something called 'Lifelong
Learning' (sic) in the 'School of Education and Professional Development'
in the 'University of Huddersfield'. Life used to be so simple with fewer words
and a lot less expense! Holly Bank's original 11-acre site was sold in 2001 and
now houses an estate of densely-packed almost-touching oxymoronic 'detached'
Wimpey houses, every one literally and metaphorically in its very own
cul-de-sac (or dead end).
Murdoch MacKenzie of Argyll
www.murdochmackenzieofargyll.com
Started July 2012
On the left are Murdoch and his daughter
Ruth on the summit of Ben Nevis
Murdoch MacKenzie was the Minister of St Andrew's Kirk in Madras (as then was)
when Barry worked in that city from April 1973 to March 1974. A charismatic
figure, Murdoch had mastered Tamil (with its alphabet of 247 complex
characters). With a congregation growing both in numbers and
in concern for and commitment to the poor, he developed work amongst the city
'slum' dwellers and the many marginalised and vulnerable folk in rural
villages.
He lived in the church's compound with his wife Anne (a medical doctor) and
their three young children, Ruth, Catriona and Iain,
two of whom were born in India. Murdoch came to support Barry's family during the month-long
terminal illness of their 8-year-old son, Ian, continuing to arrange the
funeral at St Andrew's and burial in the church graveyard by the Cooum River.
Thereafter, the two families remained close.
The MacKenzies' return to Scotland in 1978, after 12 years in South India, was
an overland journey of 7,000 miles by public transport: 15 buses, 2 trains and
2 ferries. In the Khyber Pass the brakes failed on their ancient bus and it was
only by hitting the back of a truck that they were saved from plunging off the
road and onto rocks far below. The bus, a write-off, was sold to a passing
tribesman for a thousand dollars and the family hitched a lift into Kabul in a
passing minibus, arriving just before the nightly curfew. Compare the full
account of their journey as written
by the parents with that written
by the three children! Travel writing at its very best.
On meeting Murdoch and Anne in July and again in August 2012, at
their home in Connel just north of Oban on Scotland's west coast, we began work
on a website to collect and share some of Murdoch's lifetime of writing. There
are now 149 articles ranging from sermons to reviews and from reflections to
radio talks, as well as moderator's letters from his ecumenical work in Milton
Keynes. The 6 galleries of photographs capture, among much else, Murdoch's
ascent of Britain's highest mountain, Ben Nevis (4,409 ft or 1344 m), at
the beginning of his eighth decade.
Following his very sad and untimely death in Edinburgh in February 2015, the website
became a memorial to Murdoch's life and work in Britain and in India.
Macdonald Sisters
www.macdonaldsisters.com
Started November 2012
On the left are Catriona and Mairead on one
of several sea journeys
One of the many projects in Murdoch's creative life was the rescue, cataloguing
and safe storage of the Macdonald Sisters' artwork in the Skye
and Lochalsh Archive Centre in Portree. We supplemented his work with this website,
which contains 900 photographs of the collection grouped in 32 galleries, a
43-minute video with Murdoch's voice-over and a link to Murdoch's
complete inventory. Although their parents came from Staffin and Portree on
the Isle of Skye, Catriona and Mairead Macdonald were both born in Karachi.
They were fluent in Gaelic and trained at the Harrow College of Art. Living for
some time in India and South Africa had a strong influence on their work and
they also lived in Malta and the Channel Island of Sark, as well as travelling
widely by sea.
Mairead died in 1990; Catriona in 2006 after moving to Uig
in the Isle of Skye. Murdoch, the son of one of their cousins, rescued
their many and varied works of art and design from their home on Sark.
MagBaz Pictures
www.magbazpictures.com
Started February 2013
On the left is our current motorhome, a
7-metre German Carado, reflecting the Ionian Sea in
the Greek Peloponnese
MagBaz Pictures grew out of our need for more space and easier access to the
many photographs we were collecting during our travels, which include three
round-the-world journeys each of one year (one entirely by bicycle).
For example, a 2-month self-drive tour of northern and southern India in 2005
produced 379 images, each of which we aim to keep (see samples from North India
and from South
India).
Using free Weebly software, the maximum number of photographs appears to be
unlimited, provided that no file exceeds 5MB. The menu structure creates a
series of sub-levels within a user-friendly menu system. We quickly decided on
the overall page structure, including access to photographs by year, then by
country and then by specific location. For example: 2017 – Greece – Ag
Theodora. This means that more years, countries and locations can continue to
be added until our travels come to their natural end.
Each page
has a heading, a written introduction and then a slideshow of the photographs,
each one labelled. The slideshow can work automatically or be leafed through image
by image. Individual photographs can also be selected from the strip shown
below the main picture.
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