Biography

This site

This site originally served as my blog in the early noughties, where I shared musings and photographs, however since the evolution of social media, I really didn’t have the time and motivation to update. I keep telling myself I am going to, but ultimately I’m unlikely to do so.

History
For many years I had the site hosted on my ISP’s free webspace which did not give me access to an SQL database. All articles that have been written in a daily post format have been imported. My old ‘Monthly Update’ pages prior to May 2003 are archived here, with my original site circa 1999 long since disappeared like the mythical city of Atlan…. No, forget that, I’m getting carried away!

My first site was written in notepad, and for a long time I preferred to start coding in Dreamweaver (with some base templates I’d already written), however I now work almost exclusively with WordPress and in 2010 I started working on my own framework, using the default template of the day (TwentyTen) as the basis.

I am also proficient in Photoshop, which I have been using for twenty years, and Illustrator, which I use to design and build vector graphics, or duplicate logos to output as SVG images for websites.

This site has evolved from a basic learning tool to teach myself HTML to a blog and finally a place to demonstrate my photography and, while social networking has become more prevalent and therefore more of my time is spent on such sites, I still maintain this site.

About Me

My name is Stuart Shearing, I live in Perth, Western Australia and this… is my life

  • I was born in London, England and moved to Australia in 1981.
  • With a few exceptions, I have lived mostly in Perth’s northern suburbs, particularly around the Morley area.
  • I used to have a Seal Point Siamese fur-baby called Diego, who I was overly attached to (and vice-versa), but I lost him in 2019 after a long illness. He was only 9 so he went too soon and is irreplaceable.
  • My new Cinnamon Point Siamese, Odin (the Great) has helped heal the loss of Diego and we have a great bond. Like all Siamese cats, he’s very clingy and demanding, but he is more independent.
  • Since 2010 I’ve been working from home as a web developer and also building up a professional WordPress-centric hosting service ‘Presshost’ with an aim is to provide premium level hosting at a mid-level pricing point.
  • In 2020 I fell into my current position with a company that works to ensure web accessibility.
  • My home really is my castle and I love spending time there with my wonderful wife. We love spending time in our garden and are are both avid gardeners. We also both love to cook, although she is far superior to me. You should check out her blog that has wonderful photos of her food and her recipes.
  • My biggest love is music, and I am truly eclectic. I do enjoy singing along to pop songs and show-tunes, although I wouldn’t torture anyone with karaoke!
  • Photography is a keen interest of mine and some earlier images can be found in the gallery section of this site
  • I am conversational in Bahasa Indonesia, but there’s still room for improvement.

I used share things I like and things I don’t like…
The things I like are still basically listed above and for the things I don’t like; life is too short to worry about that kind of negativity.

I’m also removing the list of music / television / movies that I like. These days, that stuff is for my close friends and family on Facebook.