Growing up in Scotland and Northern England surrounded by farms gave me a decent respect for the work involved in farming. I still remember desperately pulling on my “wellington” (gum) boots and running to catch up with the local shepherd’s tractor as he passed by our house.

Under the advice of the very same shepherd, I did not to go into farming, however, I’m still drawn by stories like this ABC episode of Australian Story on Peter Andrews:

Peter Andrews is a racehorse breeder and farmer credited with remarkable success in converting degraded, salt-ravaged properties into fertile, drought-resistant pastures. His methods are so at odds with conventional scientific wisdom, that for 30 years he has been dismissed and ridiculed as a madman. He has faced bankruptcy and family break-up.

The programme and the Natural Sequence Farming website are a good read for anyone interested in the uniqueness of the Australian landscape and the ways in which traditional European agricultural methods have worked against it.

Like most people in search of info, I have endured the old Google routine of clicking through page after page of results, to find a site that is not just trying to sell me something. It is therefore quite refreshing when you find a simple one like the search results for “carrot” and the first link is to the World Carrot Museum which has more information about carrots than you could (or should?!) probably ever need.

Of course not everyone is in need of enormous amounts of information about carrots, but for those of us that are, Google and the internet have served us well!

Right now our home page has a Google PageRank of 4/10 and we are on the first page of search results for the words “ingredients australia”. To give some perspective on that, we are currently only 7 places below Vic Cherikoff’s website and his site has a PageRank of 5/10. Vic Cherikoff’s site is one that definitely does have a great deal of valuable content relating to “ingredients australia” and has been around for a long time.

In of itself that would not be very surprising, until you consider that we have almost nothing on the front page. In fact, the page Google has currently indexed simply says “Sorry, there is nothing here yet but you can contact us at….”. Not only does it have very little content on it but it has no links out of it (except for our email) nor does Google have any links to it indexed. We have also made very little mention of our site.

How much real value this has depends on whether we are specifically aiming to attract Google traffic based on the keywords “ingredients australia”. Nevertheless it is interesting to see just how skewed search engine results can get.

(Note having said all that, these results may just disappear as soon as I publish this!)

One alternative way to present images on your site:

Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

It’s hard not to find Lightbox JS impressive and I, for one, will be linking to it!

An almost too exhaustive collection of free stock images. Great for non-profit work and also, depending on the license of the particular images used, commercial work:

Free Stock Images

Having just about finished getting together some templates for Sandra’s and my WordPress installation it’s a good point to note how much of that time I have spent sitting relatively immobile.

We tend to interchange between sitting on exercise balls (Unfortunately not these ones. We have to settle for using the cheaper versions which occasionally burst and drop you embarrassingly to the floor), a knee/kneeling chair (meaning this kind of thing, though they look better than the one we use) and an ordinary old IKEA office chair.

Until I picked up a larger monitor that doesn’t tilt back enough, I also experimented with standing while working by perching my keyboard on a raised platform. Once I got used to it I did feel more alert and the tired lower back ache I noticed I had been developing previously, subsided.

I’d also like to give walking while working a go, but that would require some changes to our office setup.

Fundamentally, I don’t think we should be looking to any one solution. Since most of the problems associated with computer use stem from repetitive behaviour it makes sense to aim for as much variety as possible.