Welcome!

I used to work as an editor and writer on UK computer magazines, latterly PC Plus. My main areas of interest were, and still are, programming and technical.

This site contains a selection of software and articles written during my PC Plus years, along with a few things I have done since.

See the list of (mostly) free software

See the article index

Much is still relevant, some rather dated.

Current skills and interests

Programming got me hooked on computers in the mid-eighties and quickly led to a career change from railway engineering to computer magazines. That early fascination with coding never left me. Programming was often an incidental part of my job during 16 years in publishing, for example writing software for cover-mounted disks.

I now spend four days per week as the production programmer at a small digital printing company where I write and maintain software that produces highly customised data-driven print runs.

Outsourced invoice printing and complex individually tailored membership documents are typical applications, though by no means the full extent of what we do. Most are written in Visual Basic 6, VB.Net and Printsoft's PReS document composition language.

Before that, I developed PHP/MySQL e-commerce applications for mail-order businesses belonging to my wife and myself. I have W3C-compliant web sites under my belt written with hand-coded CSS/XHTML and a smattering of JavaScript – luxartis.biz is an example.

I have used VBA (MS Office automation) and C/C++ extensively over the years.

Working four days often leaves me available for short freelance programming jobs and technical writing/editing. On-site work can be undertaken within travelling distance of Bath, UK.

Contact me here if you want to enquire.