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 and media activism for an anarchist society.
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. Its likely to be out of date though.
1.2 activism
These are some of the areas of activism I try to be involved with from time to time. I have various activist pages on this site.
- Free and open source software. Means that you, not a company get to decide what happens on your computer. I used to be involved in the campaign against software patents in Europe, as well as with the aktivix collective. Now I’m involved in hacktionlab. I’m a member of the FSFE Fellowship.
- I’ve done some anti-cuts campaigning and helped No Shock Doctrine for Britain make a What Will George Osborne Cut Next gizmo
- 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.
- I support the various campaigns against corporate-owned GM foods being introduced.
- 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 support.
- OARC is the Oxford Action Resource Centre. It used to be called OCSET.
- I’m a member of the Open Rights Group and a supporter of EFF, both groups campaigning for digital freedoms.
- 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 and a total surveillance database in the UK.
1.3 pals
Here are links to a few of my friends’ websites
- My colleague Michael has set up an ethical media and ad sales company called EMSM to help charities and social enterprises get their message out there.
- Nor is my lover. I helped build her PHP-based website/art experiment. She also does radicalX sex-positive activist art.
- My flatmate Graham has a cool site. And a Penguin’s Playground, where he is learning about Drupal
- Nishma has a good wordpress where she writes about global justice stuff, the topsoil
- My colleague Tom Ash has a philosophy web site called PhilosoFiles.
- 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...
- Mike is a techie buddy
- Oxford-based artist and general cool geezer Stig does lovely art on his site
- Adam writes about politics on Bright Green Scotland
- My activist buddy Jon Leighton has a sort-of-bloggy site.
- My pal Bobban runs ultra marathons for some crazy reason.
- Crispin and Fi are pals from a long while back and blog about their Mediterranean Yachting adventures
- Tom has a site called Geecologist, geddit?! He used to be my flatmate back in the day.
- Phillip Smith used to work with me at New Internationalist, he blogs about tech and the interwebs.
1. About this site
2.0 why
A combination of things really...
- I needed access to my do-list and email remotely. I don’t use it for that any more.
- 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. At the time that was pretty high tech and it still makes a decently maintainable and fairly efficient codebase.
- As a place to store various solutions to tech problems I’ve come across
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 (with the correct MIME-type) , and used CSS 3 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 guaranteed 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 privacy
I (finally) published a proper Privacy Statement for the site in early 2011
2.4 tools
I’ve been extremely lucky to have access to some great editors and other tools when building this site
- vim is an updated and incredibly powerful version of vi, the classic unix text editor, and my constant companion
- I occasionally use the GNOME editor gedit for quick updates.
- 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 with the firebug plugin and web developer toolbar is my browser setup of choice, but I often use Epiphany and the text-only Lynx during development.
- The admin interface and stuff are hosted on OX4, web hosting for Oxford activism. I make them with the "modern perl" framework, Catalyst.
2.5 code
At one point I had intended to release all the code for this site. But I’m not convinced the world needs another CMS. There are various downloads of some of the code though and 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.
2.6 graphics
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! After the 2006 redesign a logo appeared for the first time on the site. In January 2007 I added lots of gradient fills. By 2011, there were web fonts to download, but the gradient fills had disappeared. The principle still holds that I avoid unnecessary graphics. I originally started writing my site when I had a 56k modem, so performance was one of my requirements.
