Well, my name is John Whalley. I'm 47, male, and I earn my living as a librarian. For my sins.
In my time I've also been a member of a workers' co-operative which ran a wholefood shop (which went by the name of Quickening Pulses, for heaven's sake...) in Crewe (that's in Cheshire, north-west England, UK, for those who have just asked "Where?"). That was in the early 80s. I still live and work in Crewe: it's about 12-15 miles north-west of the Potteries (Stoke-on-Trent), about 30 miles south of Manchester.
why does this site exist?
Good question: at least one of my friends has insinuated that I have some kind of megalomania for wanting to produce such a thing. This is manifestly untrue...
The bottom line is that I started playing around with HTML initially when I had my Atari as my main computer, as I wanted to see how the web worked. My then ISP started to offer free web space to its customers, at which point I set it up properly, partly to prove to myself that such a thing was possible using an Atari.
From then, it's accumulated the odd useful section as well as some dross, and it's been through multiple redesigns as I've used it as a test bed for trying out new (to me) techniques. That's pretty much why I still have it, and it's helped to keep me in work: my job is now mostly web design and maintenance related, and many of the techniques and ideas I use were first tried out here.
a polite note for genealogists
I used to get rather a lot of email from genealogists until I put this bit in. No disrespect intended to your doubtless worthy pursuit, but genealogy isn't really my thing... although I'm more interested in it now than I used to be, I confess.
I've written a brief pseudo-FAQ, just to show I'm not anti-genealogy... Hopefully this information will save you the trouble of asking and me the hassle of telling you this individually.