About

Monday, February 21, 2005

About Gordon McLean

I’ve been online for almost 10 years, and have had this particular website since the 6th of August 1998 to be precise - this is the latest evolution/incarnation and the longest running with over four years of blog entries.

Now, let me get the grovelling out of the way first - I LOVE IT when people buy me things, I’m very materialistic so please please PLEASE buy me something from my wishlist. In fact I don’t think you should read any further until you do. I mean it’s only fair, I put all this effort in to this site, and you just wander in, have a gander and bugger off. Least you could do is buy me a little reward … no? … what? … hey, come back! I was only kidding!

Myself

My name is Gordon. I also responded to G and Tango (some people call me Gordy, I answer to it, but I’ve never really liked it.. only family and close friends get away with it).

By day I work in Technical Communications (making sure that everyone has the information that they need), writing software manuals and online help systems, at night I go home to my beloved wife Louise, watch TV, read books and spend too much time on the computer.

I read books in spurts, listen to a wide variety of music (growing ever wider), don’t exercise enough, drink infrequently but copiously, don’t smoke and in general lead a pretty normal life. I enjoy a good movie, tolerate many bad ones and will even watch the really crap ones, but then I pay for a yearly UGC pass so I’m determined to get my money’s worth.

So that’s me, in a nutshell (whatever that means). The rest of me you can ‘get’ by having a dig around. If you wanna get in touch I’m on MSN Messenger most days (snowgoon2206 AT hotmail.com), or just send me an email (gordon AT gordonmclean.co.uk).

About This Site

I’ve finally managed to snag both gordonmclean.co.uk and gordonmclean.com, but for many years this site was (and can still be) located at snowgoon.co.uk. The site used to be called “Something” - named when I created the daily blog bit. As I wasn’t sure how long it would last, I didn’t give the name much thought. Something.com was taken, so I ended up with snowgoon.co.uk (It’s a Calvin and Hobbes thing).

The earliest version of this site that the Wayback Machine can find is from October 2000 and doesn’t look great as it’s lost the images and stylesheets. The earliest for snowgoon.co.uk is from March 2001, and oh how I wish I’d been more diligent in keeping older versions of the site properly archived. In saying that there is still a live version of my site available at my old hosts Lineone.

I do have SOME archives but they are offline, so here’s some screenshots of what the site looked like in:

I coded every single thing here (other than the scripts I nicked off others) by hand in HomeSite. CSS controls layout and design, but despite my best efforts the site doesn’t quite meet the exacting standards of the W3C. I did try, but to be honest if it looks OK on the majority of browsers on the majority of devices then I’m a happy bunny. Standards are good though, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Privacy and Copyright Issues

I publish under a Creative Commons license. So that’s me covered (essentially, credit me if I wrote what you are using, and it would be nice to hear about where it is used as well). As for you guys, any comments left in my comment boxes are subject to my whim and whimsy … kidding. I may delete duplicated posts, or tidy up broken HTML but I will never ever ever edit your comment (OK, unless it’s hateful). That’s your responsibility, I mean it’s not like I tell you what to wear in the morning is it (is it?). I reserve the right to change my mind about this policy at any time. This is NOT a democracy.

See Also: Comment Posting Policy