I’ve finally managed to get my home page together. (Yippee!) It’s only taken  around two and a half years to finally get to the point were I can create a home-page for my website (“only!”). Two and a half years ago I thought that web-pages were, in some physical/corporeal way, objects as opposed to electronic/spiritual vibrations or impulses. (now that’s a spiritual thought) :)                                                                                                               

It’s been quite a slog to re-educate my brain to the cyber-world…

I started off with the best intentions (apart from my ability and learning speed) and subsequently parted with a sizeable amount of currency on Dreamweaver CS3 – actually the whole bundle, including Photoshop and Fireworks and, and, and…(my credit card has horns)

My initial inspiration for the website had come from the film “Field of Dreams”. Viewing the film once again, I found I was still so impressed with Kevin Cosner’s portrayal of the farmer who heard a whispered voice, telling him to build a baseball pitch at the back of his farmhouse. It was very similar to the repeated messages I kept receiving from spiritual mediums and clairvoyants,(none of whom had met each other - so it wasn’t a conspiracy) telling me to "write".

www.soulmerlin.com.

What the film did was to inspire me to build ‘soulMerlin’s Grove of Dreams’ as my own field of dreams. I wanted it to be a website to file, (literally in my mind like a green office filing cabinet), all the writing I had amassed, during the time of grief and awakening since Christina passed away.

I started filing some of the stories and accounts I had written, but I was not satisfied with the way I was storing them. The end-result looked rather like an on-line book or pdf file and I found it irritating to keep clicking on numbers to change to the next page. There was also no real provision for ‘comments’ - not that I was going to get any for quite a while.

Then I discovered blogs and blogging and the home page was forgotten for quite a while, as I became absorbed in my latest obsession.

I’m a bit like Mr. Toad in Wind in the Willows - the horse and caravan is forgotten in the wake of the shiny motor-car…

I commenced with this blog (the one you’re reading) and wrote furiously, in depth, and virtually comment-less for a year  (partly due to the fact that I didn’t know how to enable comments for the first six months.)

Bit by bit however my readership grew and eventually Tami (Pentad) commented and then Robin (Naked in Eden)…After twelve months of writing and publishing into a cyber-space void, the feedback was so sweet I could taste it. :)  

www.soulmerlin.com.

I now have five blogs and each one is like a different room in a house. Each room leads me to write in a certain way and therefore look at the world from different perspectives.

I had always wanted my home page to resemble the baseball pitch behind the farmer’s house. It also had to be joyous, like a country fairground or a farmer’s market, and above all, it had to look and feel like the English countryside I love.

I did have a home page, but the design looked confused and cluttered and I had made a real mess of the fonts. So I sort of “forgot” it and got on with my blogging. Neverthless, the thought kept returning - "how to help folk to keep track of my five blogs? Subscriptions, emails and blog-rolls sounded like a lot of effort for people. One day I would just have to bite the bullet and try to make a new one by myself (it took me three months just to ‘get into’ and understand my ftp programme - a snail would have been high-speed by comparison.)       

Put it this way, if I had a pet tortoise, I would call it Maserati.

I find it easier to keep up with ‘one-blog bloggers’ as I  know ‘where they are’, as opposed to multi-bloggers like myself; all with different titles and URL’s to keep track of. What I needed was a home page to tie all the blogs together, with some way of directing a casual visitor straight to the latest entry. I wanted it to have a minimum of words and to be like a colourful picture-book.  A book that would be a pleasure to look at.

My ‘colourful picture-book’ idea did seem to be an impossible dream, considering my naivety/stupidity in the area of computer and internet technology, but the knowledge must have been seeping into my ancient brain by a process of geriatric osmosis - rather like blots joining up on a piece of blotting paper. (hands up who remembers blotting paper – don’t lift them too high, you might hurt yourself).

Then around a week ago, it all seemed to ‘come together’ in my head,  with the thought “I can do it”.

And I have.

www.soulmerlin.com.

Well, it’s still very much ‘work in progress’. At the time of writing, three panels are unfinished and I still have to put in elements like: ‘contact’ ‘alerts’ ‘faqs’ – but it’s a start and you might find it easier to keep track of my writing by logging onto www.soulmerlin.com and the weekly update, rather than bookmarking each blog, or trying to remember five long url’s.

I’d love your feedback and any suggestions you can make. I’ve a lot to learn and I’m going to take my time and enjoy the process, as I find it totally absorbing.

I’m pleased with the background, which I took on last summer’s visit to   Mother Shipton’s Cave, with Liz and my eldest Grandson (I can’t be writing grandson, I’m still a child!). I took a detail from a view of the riverbank I had nearly discarded because I thought it lacked a centre point of interest (duck, swan, rowing boat) and put it through Photoshop to get the blurred crayon effect.

I’m finishing this post before getting a good night’s sleep, as Liz and I are off to the island of Lindisfarne tomorrow, for a three day break. I wrote about Lindisfarne, or Holy Island as it is also called, a year ago and I’m really looking forward to exploring it. I never got round to visiting the island in my youth, even though it is just off-shore and not that far from Durham City where I was born.

I’m taking my laptop though – I had just managed to start to catch-up on my blog reading…until last week when we were in Bromley, with no internet access at all as the theatre had impenetrable walls, together with underground dressing rooms. I inevitably fell behind with my blog visits once more, but at least had the time to make my home-page design a reality.

Hopefully I will be able to get a signal on Lindsfarne and be able to visit and read the blogs of all the good friends I have gained since first going on-line in February 2007.

I do hope the weather is good, as driving to Liz today was more akin to sailing or surfing than travelling on four wheels. I hope the weather will be good for our holiday, but even if it teems down, I have a feeling it will be an adventure.

There is something about Lindisfarne that fascinates me.

Finally, for those with technical leanings: I do all of my photography in RAW

(and occasionally with a bath-towel around my waist)

henry

Ps: www.soulmerlin.com.