Self Indulgence

The evolution of megalithomania.com has gone through a few guises and looks, and it's gone through one more! The latest changes have come about after over a year of staying pretty much the same. Despite the old layout being great I feel that web-sites, even when they grow in content weekly, need to move on - to develop and not get stagnant.

I started off with 'FourWinds Tour' as a flat HTML site of little or no design/flare, it was just a medium to get my experiences down in writing somewhere, it became my diary as well as a gateway to you. Keeping a diary was never a task that I had undertaken with any conviction and so I have surprised myself slightly in managing to keep megalithomania going.

The move to megalithomania.com saw great changes, great possibilities. To be able to use PHP and a database opened up new frontiers, new ways of allowing you to view the information contained here and new ways for me to present it.

I have resisted the temptation to open up this site for others to contribute to. That's where my self indulgence comes into play. I have gone down the route of creating a personal gazetteer and I'm afraid it's going to stay that way. There are many other sites on the web where people can enter their own information and pictures, some of which will appear on the Links Page.

Now for further self indulgence ..... To The Stones !!!

Thanks

I could not have created this site as it looks now without the massive design input from Holy McGrail. I can't offer enough thanks (or beers) for the help he's given me in 'artistic direction' and coding hints. The page layouts are his conception and we have shared the coding between us. For more of Holy McGrail's great work visit The Modern Antiquarian and Head Heritage. Holy also did the mega-maps.

I must give many special thanks to Anthony Weir of Irish Genius for all his help and information. He has corrected many errors made by myself and taught me a lot about Ireland and stones in general.

I also thank Anthony Weir and all the great folks at Head Heritage for their comments and encouragement and Derek Lea for the spirals that I no longer use.

There is one last group of people I must offer the most thanks to .... my family for their patience when I disappear every Sunday and quite a few Saturdays too. They've even ventured with me on some occasions. For all that I can't thank them enough!

To each and everyone of you ..... Ride On!!

Onwards

My obvious intention is to visit every site in Ireland. Look, everyone needs a dream! I have started specific catagories for site types that I hadn't included before with any real conviction, such as castles, churches and holy wells, and this will obviously take more time. It will, however, make this site grow to become a greater repository of not only Irish megalithic sites, but of Irish antiquities.

Let's see how far I can get.

Technical

I have dropped all the DHTML .. I really liked the way it made megalithomania look, but it caused too many problems for older browsers. The site as it is has been tested on IE 5.5, IE 6, Netscape 7 and Mozilla 1.2.1, on both Mac and Windoze platforms. There are some minor issues, but it works well on all of them.

I have added some extra colour schemes to the site. There were a few comments about the Original scheme being too easy for people's bosses to spot while people were browsing at work ... ahem! Shame on you! Anyway, one of the more subtle colour schemes should suit you better.

Please let me know of any problems encountered and I will do my best to make fixes as soon as possible.

There some known problems with the counties map. This manifests itself by the current county not always highlighting properly. This is inconsistent across browser versions and seems to be related to the Flash plug-in version. We are working to fix this problem.

Copyright etc ...

I don't believe in copyright really, but I don't want my words and images used for things that I would not approve of. With this in mind I have to claim a pseudo-copyright and say that you must ask before using anything from this site. Just mail me, giving information as to where the image will be used and I will probably say "Yes". It couldn't be more simple. The most I will ask is for a prominent link to my site. You are free to use the Hi-Res images for personal wallpaper without asking.