OK, I know that this site doesn’t look like much at the moment, and there’s nothing to see, but I’m getting there! I haven’t got the styles to work exactly how I want them yet, but I’m not far off.

As I see it, the sequence is something like this:

1. Work out a basic design
2. Get a static site hosted at my address (po-ru.com) using my free webspace
3. Set up my own server (Apache/MySQL/Perl) to do dynamic content
4. Add my programs, links, services, and other useful stuff

This hand-crafted HTML is OK, but it’s annoying to type and really difficult to read from my point of view! I want to get all this heavy lifting done by some automation (i.e. Perl) so that I can easily add content. I’m also planning to make it a multi-lingual site, so that (where appropriate) information can be viewed in different languages. Probably just English and Japanese to start with, and maybe French as well. At this stage, I’m just staking out my turf, I guess. I have exams coming up, along with an assignment or two, so I can’t let myself spend all my time doing this for the next few weeks. Anyway, my server box has run out of disk space—I need to rearrange...

So...what does the name mean?

Well, the answer is simple enough. My name is Paul, and that is transliterated into Japanese as po-ru (written in the Japanese katakana characters that you see at the top of this page). It’s short, easy to type, and easy to remember (for my Japanese friends, anyway). It was available as a domain name, so I took it.