Sorry about the longer gap between blog entries, but I've had a pretty busy web-week, putting together a couple of new sites, apart from working on this one.

Local radio station Express FM has a Sunday morning local history programme, presented by Robin Kay, which is pretty interesting. It's more recent history, with the reminiscences of local people going back to around the first world war - eye witness stuff is always fascinating.

Robin and I have exchanged a few e-mails in the past week, and we're going to include a special section inside Portsmouth Now and Then, giving the History Show its own bit of web space, and that's one of the things I've been working on this week. You can see the results so far if you click on the picture of Robin just below this:-

If any of you spot any links that don't appear to be working, I'd be grateful, as ever, if you could e-mail the details to me, so I can put them right, though I think everything in that part of the site is now functioning properly.

I also had a couple of intersting encounters with the ladies this week - no, not like that! - the first of whom is probably somewhere in her late seventies, but sprightly as you would ever want to be. She was telling me how her grandfather was a keen photographer, and that she has a large collection of his photographs that she is sorting through.

Some of his stuff dates from way before the first world war, and I can't wait to see it - because yes, this kind lady has offered to let me see the whole collection and scan anything that would suit this website!

The second lady is a good bit younger, but she loves old photos and has quite a collection of old family pictures, as well as pictures of all sorts of things that date back decades, and again, she has kindly agreed to let me go through them in the very near future.

I've also found some well out of copyright stuff on the old Interwobble, which I'm tidying up for future inclusion. As I said many weeks ago, there IS plenty of Portsmouth stuff out there on the web, but sometimes it's not too easy to find, but perseverance pays off in the end!

And don't forget, we can't ever have too much material for Portsmouth Now and Then, so if you've got anything tucked away, please get in touch. And now it's back to the mill ...

Cheers for now,

I haven't managed to add a lot to this site during the week, as I've been a bit tied up with doing stuff in preparation for our new computer diagnostic and repair service (it now has its own web site at http://www.interfix.org (see the link panel down on the right hand side of this page, or click the URL above here), but Chapter 4 of Uncle Ghost is up and working, with a couple more chapters to come, just as soon as I can edit them, proof them and sort out the pages.

Meantime, I've just noticed that there are a couple of problem links in the Navigation Bars in a few pages - not quite sure what's happened there, but I'm fixing them as I find them, so if you stumble across any that aren't working, please e-mail me and let me know.

Meantime, I do have a couple more feature articles more or less written, and with luck I should get at least one of them posted here over the weekend. I'm also working on another fun quiz, which seems to be a popular feature among many of you, but all these things take time ...

Have a good weekend, whatever you've got planned, and I'll be back in this blog in another few days.

It's been a quiet week for me, at least as far as this website is concerned, because I've had to concentrate on a couple of others that I'm working on at the moment, including the one for the service we're calling "Interfix" - that's basically about our I.T. and design people offering their services to the public (including you, if you live in the Portsmouth area.

So, next time your PC or network gives you trouble, or maybe breaks down altogether, give us a call and we'll be able to sort it out for you, probably at a much cheaper price and a lot quicker than you'll get elsewhere.

If you want to take a look at the Interfix website, it's at www.interfix.org and you can visit it by clicking on the button below here. Meantime, I'll be working back on this site again over the weekend and throughout next week.

Until then, cheers for now and enjoy the sunshine while it lasts!

Got back to some proper feature writing yesterday - at last! The last few days has been all about going through and checking pages for accuracy in their Navigation Bar links - one or two link tabs had slipped into places they shouldn't have been, mainly because I was copying a "wrong" panel a few weeks back, but I won't bore you with the details.

What I need to tell you about is the NEW STUFF that I posted yesterday and Monday - article on John Pounds is done now, as is the longer one on A E Cogswell, the famous Portsmouth pub architect, and I've posted the feature article on Sir John Carter and the Carter family, although I still have to add a couple more images and a summary text box, which I hope to do this morning.

There's also another of the Photogalleries, with a collection of 20 more really interesting old photographs - click the link below to go straight there, or go via the GALLERY INDEX page.

Nice to report that the number of visitors has gone up considerably this past week - still not overheating the site counters, but we more than doubled up, and now we're starting to show up near the top of various Google searches; we also have a few reciprocal links in place now, which should help immensely - if you can add a link from your My Space, Facebook, or whatever, please do ...

Meantime, I've started work on a slightly different addition to this site, but I'll tell you more about that later. Have a good old day.

Cheers for now,

A day and a half of "housekeeping" - sorting out more pages, including a glaring spelling error that nobody seems to have spotted, even though it appeared near the top of 60 gallery pages!

Possibly still a few anomalies to iron out, but we seem to be getting there now, so I'm looking forward to getting back to putting together some more feature pages; I did manage to add a new gallery yesterday, though - twenty pages and something like 30-odd excellent old images of Southsea. Well worth a look, either via the Gallery Index page, or a quick click here:-

I've also spent a fair bit of time sorting out a few anomalies on the Navigation Bars - some pages still had older versions of the Navbar, and consequently clicking on some of the links sent readers to the wrong pages. I think that's more or less all sorted now (fingers crossed), although I keep finding odd things that aren't doing what they should do, and correcting them as I go.

Don't forget, if you find any litle glitches like that, please e-mail me and let me know - and thanks to those people who have already drawn my attention to a few bits and pieces, such as the brown "OTHER SITES" link tab goes to the Dickens Fellowship site - I'm slowly working through pages to correct that, as it should first go to the Portsmouth Rolls page in this site, from where there are links banners to the external sites. It'll be quite a while before I've changed all the pages, but we'll get there ...

And so to another day tomorrow, when I'm hoping to put together a couple more photo galleries with some superb old pictures, and perhaps finish off a couple of features that I've started, but was waiting for further information and pictures, before I could finish them.

Cheers for now
,

Funny sort of weekend, really. First there was The Ashes: after Friday afternoon's incredible events, the next couple of days unfolded amidst an almost surreal air of disbelief - and then, quite suddenly, England wrapped it all up quite easily after tea yesterday. Maybe not Portsmouth hsitory, but a bit of cricket history, nonetheless.

Meanwhile, I spent quite a bit of time this weekend designing a photo gallery template, which should more than halve the time it was previously taking me to build galleries; that's good news, as I've got a lot of pictures, old and new alike, waiting to be included.

This morning I put together a second Photo Gallery of photos I took at the end of last week; you can access it rhough the Gallery Index tab above, or simply click on the image link below this:

Meanwhile, I'm having trouble with my wireless router and my DVD drive has jammed solid, so I'm off to grab a replacement drive - and a BIG hammer. The router will have to hold out for another 24 hours or so, but then that's for the chop, too!

Hopefully, once I let the technology know who is boss around here, I will be able to get quite a bit of new material into the site throughout the rest of the week. Fingers crossed - and cheers for now.