The Pocket Website grew out of a set of bookmarks, in the days before browsers could structure a list. It's published in the belief it is be useful to others, but its focus reflects my own professional and personal interests and will continue to do so.
Why the "Pocket Website"? Originally because it would fit on a floppy disk (anyone remember them?) and so could be put in the pocket! At first, this was just the means to transfer my bookmarks between different machines easily. Then, when email providers became ISPs, I placed it on the Web so I could get at it from any internet-connected machine, and refer other people to it. But the "pocket" idea stuck, so the site is kept small, fast, and (although it's grown quite a lot) hopefully easy to navigate.
So: no big images, no interactive presentations, and not visually the world's most enthralling website! It's almost entirely text, with a few small images, lots of tables, a simple style sheet and a very little Javascript. Links are removed as well as added! Most links show the date they were added or, if the date is *starred, confirmed.
What do I provide? Basically, a categorised set of links to things I find useful with, increasingly, a short comment alongside quite a lot of them. Alongside this, I still publish the Pocket Guides to Year 2000 as an archive of what, for an amateur website, became recognised as a useful resource at the time. It taught me a lot about maintaining a site where content had to be continually updated!
The Pocket Website is not trying to compete with bigger and better-maintained sites. It is not trying to be a comprehensive list of resources. It aims to include primarily sites which are good gateways to a range of other resources. It will always have a UK and European focus. It includes things when I want to find them straightforwardly and easily, without going through Google.
It has evolved and will continue to evolve. But if I'm not waiting for it to be perfect!
I'm not open to suggestions for new categories, but please mail me if you find broken links. The Pocket Website is maintained on a "best efforts" basis although it is now part of my portfolio at InformationSpan, so I can usually fix errors quite quickly. I develop and check it on Firefox on a Mac. I don't check it for other platforms, but in most cases a simple adjustment to your default text size should make it work for you. If you're reporting an error, please tell me what platform you're using (OS, browser, and version numbers for both).
This site is maintained on an Apple Macintosh computer.
Please send comments to me at InformationSpan