0. Contents
0. Contents (here)
1. About me
2. About this site
1. About me
1.0 who i am
I'm Charlie Harvey from Oxford, UK. I'm interested in all things techie, especially free software and GNU/Linux. I'm also into punk rock, dub reggae, and good cider. I'm fairly involved with anarchist politics and direct action for social justice. For a (startlinigly similar!) 'who am I' to this, see my rootshell page.
1.1 work and professional
- I work as the IT Manager for New Internationalist, a publishing workers co-op that has been working for over 30 years to highlight radical issues not covered in the corporate media
- I'm involved with the grassroots web hosting collective OX4.
- I used to work as the IT Systems Manager for People & Planet, an organization that works with UK students to empower them to campaign on issues of Human Rights, world poverty, and the environment.
- I used to help out at Corporate Watch, the UK-based activists who investigate corporate misrule of the planet.
- I used to work as the IT Manager for hotrecruit, a dotcom involved in recruitment for students and young people.
- You can view my CV elsewhere on the site.
1.2 activism
These are some of the areas of activism I try to be involved with from time to time
- Free and open source software. Means that you, not a company get to decide what happens on your computer. I've been involved in the campaign against software patents in Europe, as well as with the aktivix collective.
- Climate Change is the biggest threat to our species we've yet faced. I was involved in organising the Camp for Climate Action to help develop a grassroots resistance to it. Nowadays I'm also involved in the radical direct action group Thames Valley Climate Action.
- The G8 is a group of wealthy nations who dictate how the rest of the world should live their lives (as slaves to corporate misrule seems to be the normal conclusion). Me and some pals did an action to protest when the G8 came to Gleneagles in Scotland. I also helped People & Planet run their G8 summer festival there.
- Nuclear power won't solve climate change. I got arrested for saying so.
- Consuming stuff makes you miserable and fucks up your planet. Unless you're in a consumer cult.
- Indymedia is a grassroots media collective who I hang out with now and again
- OARC is the Oxford Action Resource Centre. It used to be called OCSET.
- I haven't done much road protesting for a couple of years now.
- I was involved quite heavily in anti-war activism
- NO2ID is a campaign against the introduction of compulsory biometric ID cards in the UK.
1.3 pals
Here are links to a few of my friends' websites
- Nor is my lover. I helped build her PHP based website/art experiment.
- My flatmate Graham has a cool site.
- I used to go out with Rose, and we're still good friends. I helped her build her website, which she was once planning on using to drum up business for her artistic talents...
- Oxford-based artist and general cool geezer Stig does lovely art on his site
- My activist buddy Jon Leighton has a sort-of-bloggy site.
1. About this site
2.0 why
A combination of things really...
- I needed access to my do-list and email remotely.
- I wanted to keep my hand in at web design.
- I wanted to build a site that was as accessible as possible, and met the w3c standards for xhtml and css
- I wanted a place to keep my photos
- As an excuse to practice perl's CGI.pm, HTML Template and DBImodules.
- Because I think it makes me look cool ;-)
2.1 standards
Web standards are a good thing® in my opinion. They mean that the content of the page is the same in any browser. They further mean that in any standards compliant browser, the page will look the same.
I've set out to make the site conform to xhtml 1.1 , and used css 2.1 for the presentational side. You'll see the w3c buttons at the bottom of all conforming pages. Because my newsfeeds page grabs its information from different places, it isn't guarenteed to be standards compliant - it works most of the time though!
2.2 accessibility
One of the things that I wanted to learn about with this project was accessibility. This means that people with visual or auditory impairments (and web spiders) can read the content of my pages as easily as anyone else, which seems only fair, really.
Pages on the site have been scanned using online tools to ensure
their compliance with the
w3c Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines for
online "content".
There's three levels of accessibility: A,AA, and AAA. Most of the public pages on this
site should meet the AAA standard, exceptions include
Real Ultimate Perl geeks
where I felt the idoim justified breaking my accessibility policy.
2.3 tools
I've been extremely lucky to have access to some great editors and other tools when building this site
- jEdit is a fantastic text editor aimed at all kinds of developers
- vim is an updated and incredibly powerful version of vi, the classic unix text editor, and my constant companion
- bluefish is an html editor that runs on GNU/Linux and makes the process of creating web pages a little easier.
- The w3c provide comprehensive references on html and CSS, and their free html validator and css validator have proved invaluable.
- Bobby online's accessibility checker helped me get my arse in gear over accessibility, but it's no longer there :-(
- Firefox is my browser of choice, but I often use Epiphany and the text-only Lynx during development.
2.4 code
All the code that this site uses will eventually be released under the GPL. I want to make sure that I document everything first, though! At the moment general users would find my documentation style somewhat cryptic(!) If you want to use any of the code in it's raw, undocumented state, please feel free to contact me. Some code is already available in writings.
2.5 graphics
After the 2006 redesign a logo appeared for the first time on the site. As of January 2007, there are also some pretty gradient fills. I aim to keep the graphics to a minimum, except for places where that would be silly like the gallery. There used to be no graphics on the site at all! I originally started writing it when I had a 56k modem, so performance was one of my requirements.
