About this Website

Read about the visitors to this website, the history of the site, and the technology in use.

Visitors

You may view a map showing locations of the last 20 visitors to this website! (you'll need a recent browser, no older than Internet Explorer 5.5 - it works well with the free browser Firefox).

The location service is supported by advertising and we have no control over the advertisements displayed on that page.

It is updated hourly, and uses Google Maps and Satellite images to view the locations.

It doesn't show precise locations, probably it uses the addresses of the visitors' Internet Service Provider as an approximation to the visitors' addresses.

When viewing the map, click on 'satellite' and then zoom in to see the locations in close-up satellite photos - give it a try!

If you would like to see satellite photos in even higher resolution, try out the free service from Google Earth

History

This site started in 1996 with a few hand-coded pages of plain HTML, mostly using retyped (and later scanned) material from past issues of New Chan Forum, together with the retreat programme details.

The site has grown over the years, and is now (2005) about 300 pages plus many downloadable documents.

View past versions of the site in the Wayback Machine: 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006.

The current design is by Hughie Carroll, implemented by webmaster Simon Child.

Technology

The Content Management System in use is TYPO3. TYPO3 is a LAMP based Open Source Software product which is very powerful and flexible.

The webserver runs the Centos Linus Operating System, hosted by Dr Simon Child.

The websited is coded in a tableless layout using XHTML 1.0 and CSS, and checked for accessibility with WebXact.

The site search is implemented using Google. The site search box is found at the bottom of every page.