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I came in through the art. I followed one of David Denison's paintings back to its source โ one of the non-human faces, all reds and ambers โ and did not expect the source to be a thirty-year cathedral of a website that I already visited years ago.
I make filmed portraits of artists, which is to say I spend my days looking at images and trying to understand the hand behind them. What struck me first was the painter โ a man Max Ernst once crossed the Channel to see, and almost nobody remembers it.
What kept me was realising the site itself is the work: every letter coloured by hand, every page placed by hand. A surrealist canvas that never stopped being painted, only now in HTML.
So I came to look, and I'll stay to read.
Glad to be among you, and warm wishes to the whole household of this place.
I came in through the art. I followed one of David Denison's paintings back to its source โ one of the non-human faces, all reds and ambers โ and did not expect the source to be a thirty-year cathedral of a website that I already visited years ago.
I make filmed portraits of artists, which is to say I spend my days looking at images and trying to understand the hand behind them. What struck me first was the painter โ a man Max Ernst once crossed the Channel to see, and almost nobody remembers it.
What kept me was realising the site itself is the work: every letter coloured by hand, every page placed by hand. A surrealist canvas that never stopped being painted, only now in HTML.
So I came to look, and I'll stay to read.
Glad to be among you, and warm wishes to the whole household of this place.
Just to add my little bit here, I've been working on the site with Dave for over 25 years now, since early 2001. We've put thousands of hours into adding the content - Dave has written and researched everything you read on the site itself, I'm the one who deals with the technical and computer aspects and I taught Dave how to publish his own pages in the early 2000s - before that Dave used to put the pages together then I would turn them into html and upload batches of multiple pages every so often.
Regarding the Oracle forum, that started in 2006 after I'd nattered Dave to have a forum for several years, he wasn't keen on the idea for a long time, but eventually he came round to the idea that having somewhere for people to discuss and add to the site was actually quite a good idea.
At that time I had to teach myself a bit of php, which is the computer language the forumโs written in, and from there create the forum as Dave envisioned - he decided on the colours and the overall appearance, I made it happen, as has been our working process for the last quarter century. Andy came on board to moderate the forum, then 20 years passed and here we are today!
So there's basically a team of 3 running the site behind the scenes - Dave, Andy and myself. We all have our different skills and together we've created a site that now gets almost a quarter of a million visitors a month. Hope that's enlightened you a little - I can't tell you exactly how many hours we've spent on it in total, but it's in the multiple thousands over the 25 years.
Cheers,
Rob
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Rob, Site Admin & Oh Tech No Wizard
If it doesnโt plug in, I donโt like it