A lot of new visitors to this site may wonder what it is all about.  I expect many people will look here and think to themselves, "Mike's doing a wonderful job of keeping himself amused."  I think this is true of the majority of the world's websites:  they're mainly one-man shows or there's only a handful of people who contribute to a site's content.  This is the greatest challenge to anyone who intends to develop a website:  how do I attract support from others?

I'd like you to allow me a self-indulgent moment to write about my experience and philosophy of web-craft - that is designing, building and managing websites.  If you are familiar with the movie Field of Dreams you will recall the inspiration of the story's main character, "If you build it he will come."  Leaving aside the many criticisms of the movie – a chick-flick for blokes, idealising and idolising baseball as the quintessence of American culture (although Victorians probably feel the same about Aussie Rules) and that it stars Kevin Costner – I often suppose that many people who design and build websites suffer from the delusion "If I build it they will come", that is, building a website (and getting it into Google) is all there is to it!

There is more to web-craft that mere construction.  Of course, as a high priority, a website has to look attractive - it has to draw an audience to look it over - but it also has to be promoted, tirelessly and persistently until people buy into it and it gathers sufficient momentum to take off under its own steam.

In this modern world which is dominated by Facebook and Twitter it's hard to head off in an independent direction away from the mainstream; if you do there's a danger you'll become lost, forgotten or ridiculed for it.  While there's nothing basically wrong with Facebook or Twitter, these neatly-packaged solutions often fail to deliver something of substance ... or something that helps people grow.  Facebook and Twitter are very much of the now; they're not of the future. You may remember in Field of Dreams people scoffed at the main character's idea of building a baseball park in a cornfield in an insignificant little place in Iowa. What was the sense in doing that?

I do my own website development because I can, not because I'm competing with the commercialism of Facebook or Twitter (although it's possible that my intentions may be somewhat quixotic).  I would rather declare my intentions, as far as this site is concerned, that it is not primarily a place for me to 'blog.  It's true that I like to write and I love to tell stories but, by the same token, I don't want to produce this website as a kind of "Facebook of Michael Russell".  I want this to be a place that's used by others and to serve their needs as much as it serves my own.  This should be your site and I would be delighted to act as its caretaker.

When I approached someone with this idea their first question was "How do you intend for something like this to survive if you are unable to look after it?"  It's a fair question.  I don't know what lies around the corner.  Let me say, though, looking back over the history of the internet, how long has the oldest website remained in existence and what chance does any site have for long-term survival?

We're not getting any younger and I want to say, while I still have my health, that I've made the best effort I could.  But I need your help to make my "Field of Dreams" a reality.