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.