About Spode
I was born and bred in the United Kingdom, currently residing in Kent, the garden of England.
I've been fiddling with computers as long as I can remember so it's no surprise that I had an early start writing for computer magazines at the age of 16, when discovered by Jeremy Spencer of Computer Shopper Magazine. I made a large contribution to the “Shopper Labs" for many years.
As a freelance I have contributed to most of the major IT publications in the UK and had content republished around the world in several languages. The publications I have had the most involvement with, are Custom PC Magazine, Trusted Reviews and PC Extreme. I was a retained freelancer at Custom PC and also wrote their recent 2007 Benchmarking Suite. I was Technical Editor of Trusted Reviews for the year of 2006, which also involved writing a benchmark suite, before returning to freelance (I prefer more variety in my work).
Most of my writing has been about PC hardware, but I have covered most areas including software, services, consumer products and gadgets. My writing style is concise and as technically accurate as possible.
I am an avid Linux user, using it for both servers and clients. I now only using Windows under a virtualized VirtualBox environment for testing purposes. I use a variety of distributions, but predominantly Fedora and Ubuntu. I don't play many games, but I am a fan of Half Life 2 and retro adventure games such as Monkey Island.
I program in PHP/MySQL as well as Visual Basic for RAD under Windows. I consider myself more of a scripter than a programmer. I do all my PHP/CSS/XHTML by hand using a number of different IDEs.
I run thinkbikes.com with a close friend David Lowe. Think Bikes is a mountain bike stunt display team, for which I ride as well as manage. I also run thinksecretsanta.com, which is a tool to help with working out secret santas at Christmas time.
I am obviously a keen cyclist, but I also enjoy music, singing, theatre, reading and natural photography.
About Spode's Abode
Spode's Abode was originally a hardware modification website, founded in 2000. It soon converted to a hardware review site and reached its peak in 2004. However, despite selling our content to PC Extreme magazine, I could not invest the time or money to get the site profitable. I instead turned my focus to writing for other publications. Most of the old content has been archived off, but a lot has been removed over the years as it became stale.
Instead of writing the new site from scratch, I opted to use Lussumo's Vanilla. I felt that if I was going to spend anytime developing, it may as well be as an add-on that will benefit the open source community. Out of the box, this is very simple forum, which I installed and modifed add-ons to get the desired functionality, before changing the design to suit. The logo was created by Doug Kennedy of Undabo.com.
It's hard to find the time to write fully fledged articles for Spode's Abode, as I'd sooner sell them to another publication. However, running a blog gives me an oppurtunity to put useful tidbits online, as well portions of articles I have written for other publications. I aim to promote interesting technological discussion.