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Why Tardus?

It is Latin for "slow" and my first boat was going to be slow. I asked my daughter, who loved Latin at high school, what the word was for slow, and back came "Tardus" (Not to be confused with Dr Who's "Tardis", though both are blue, boxy and bigger inside than outside)

Why a Hobbit?

I've been a reader of JRR Tolkien's books for nearly 40 years, and I do in fact live in what the locals affectionately call "The Shire".

Web Site Philosophy

The word philosophy means "love of wisdom, or knowledge, especially that which deals with ultimate reality, or with the most general causes & principles of things ... from Greek PHILO (love) and SOPHOS (wisdom)" - Concise Oxford Dictionary.

My Own Philosophy

For this just browse my web site. That's what it is all about. The site is meant to reflect the things that are important to me, and as it grows will do that better (I hope!)

Web Site Design Philosophy

We often use the word philosophy to mean a set of guiding principles that apply to a particular facet of life, or work. I have such a philosophy for the design of this web site. The guiding principles are:-

Keep it simple for visitors. It is fast for those without high bandwidth access, and simple enough to work well with just about any web browsing software.
Content, content, content! Content is more important than pizzazz. Words (plenty of them) and pictures (in moderation, and none bigger than about 640x480) are what count). At least, that's what I like in someone else's web site ;-0
Keep it simple for me to maintain and add to. My structure uses plain text files as the source documents for the web pages, and some simple UNIX/Linux scripts on one of my home computers. One of these scripts uses Aurelio Jargas' brilliant TXT2TAGS ("text to tags") software http://txt2tags.org to do the actual conversion to HTML (ie, web pages). I just edit my text files, run the master script, check that everything looks fine, then transfer the resulting HTML and image files to my web space (provided by web-hoster http://3ix.com).