website on the move

I haven't updated my dear old website for a few years (because life was moving fast and the process of uploading files to the site was painfully complicated), and a recent invoice revealed that the cost of hosting it was rising to more than a dollar a day, which made me realise that this arrangement was rather a waste of money.

screenshot of my index page which apparently I haven't changed since January 2012

As a temporary fix, I have now created permanent "pages" on this blogspot account, including one for my homepage, to which my domain name www.michaelgross.co.uk points, as well as an updated version of my whoIam biography page and the list of my books. This was also an opportunity to get rid of the numerous am*zon links I still had on my book pages from the early days before enshittification. I'm giving up on the list of all my articles, which I hadn't updated beyond December 2020 and on the family history page as these activities are now better represented by the relevant tags on the blog. The hosting service of the website ends on February 2nd.

A history of my website is here. The full version continues to exist on my hard drive and various USB sticks of course, so I may resurrect it elsewhere at some point, maybe on the occasion of its 30th birthday in December ...

Update 25.1.2026: I created a new portal to navigate family history blog entries in the shape of a permanent Who Is Who page.

20 years online

I have no idea where that time went, but it appears that it’s 20 years ago today that I launched my first website, from which the current site evolved mostly by alternating courses of uninhibited random growth and moderate pruning.

In the last few years, and especially since my tumblr started to attract some followers from late 2012 onwards, I have neglected the old website a little bit, but just now I have cleaned it up a bit and updated things like the publications list. In a way, the various blogs and other online outlets could be seen as the shoots and flowers growing from the original tree I planted in 1996, so I’ll take this anniversary as an excuse to write up a short history of my web presence, although now, 20 years later, almost everybody on the planet has a web presence.

I feel my hair turning grey as I write this, but I actually managed to finish my PhD without ever having used the internet. I did write the thesis on a computer and had a Neolithic laptop, but the network as such was still under construction as I finished, and hadn’t reached my lab yet by the time I left. On arrival at Oxford in 1993 I learned about things like email, and the www, and some time in 1996 I must have realised that everybody could put a page (or twenty) on the web, so why not me?

In the xmas break I learned the essentials of HTML from a book and started composing my home page, which launched on 30.12.1996 under the not so original title of Michael’s Home Page. Rooted in an old technology newspapers and magazines background, I aimed at publishing a numbered issue every week, with sections including science, science communication, bilingualism.

On 13.1.1997, issue 3 appeared with title “Only Connect!”, based on the quote from EM Forster’s novel Howards End which still serves as a motto today and has provided the title and URL for my blog, proseandpassion.com.

After a year, the site had 43 pages, and it soon grew into a tree structure with eight or nine first level pages branching out into hundreds of second and third level ones. For nine years and a bit, it remained my main web presence, and I probably spent way too much time on updating it, which may well have killed my academic career.

Then, in the tenth year, and a few years after leaving the academic career behind, I found my way to MySpace and discovered blogging, as every MySpace account came with a blog by default. For comparison, I also tried yahoo/geocities and blogspot, which is the one I kept using after MySpace went down the drain.

When I moved out of Birkbeck College in 2006, a version of my website stayed there, and is still online here). Incidentally this is about the last version before I introduced the “bookshelf” design of the front page which is still up today, launched in July 2006.

After the great Exodus from MySpace, I joined Facebook, then twitter, and finally tumblr. Initially twitter worked best for me, but in the last few years tumblr has become the outlet where followers actually see and react to my stuff. Although the stats on blogspot aren’t too bad either these days.

With all the excitement of the more interactive and “social” sites, the old website got neglected a little bit, but I still polish it up when I have a new book to promote, or, as happened this year, when the delay in the publications list becomes too embarrassing.

At some point, I may even blow some dust off the 10-year-old front page design. I’ll put that on my (virtual) list of New Year’s resolutions.

My front page as it looks today - I think my initial idea was to change those bookends regularly to refresh the look, but I got stuck with the second pair I made ...

The site is at
http://www.michaelgross.co.uk/
as well as at
michaelgross.info

teenage troubles in tuscany

Love Falls
Esther Freud
2007

Some time in the 1990s, I compiled a list of people from my birth year plus/minus one who had achieved something significant already. Don’t laugh, turning 30 can do this to your brain! One of my more famous contemporaries on that list (which also featured on the early editions of my website from summer 1997 onwards) was writer Esther Freud (daughter of painter Lucian Freud, and great-granddaughter of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, since you ask).

By that time, Freud had only published two novels, Hideous Kinky (1991) and Peerless Flats (1994), of which I read the latter – the former was soon after turned into the eponymous film featuring Kate Winslet, at which point Freud’s writing career seemed assured. Of her subsequent novels I greatly admired Gaglow (1997), which uses her German/British intercultural heritage to great effect, but didn’t quite know what to make of The sea house (2003).

With Love Falls she returns to the mind world of the teenage girl, which I suppose is what she does best. Of course I can’t really tell, as I don’t know it from the inside, but it looks convincing to the bystander. It is July 1981 (as readers are supposed to know due to the references to the wedding of Charles Windsor and Diana Spencer, but I had to look it up!), and our protagonist, Lara, 17 (born in spring 1964, she also qualifies for my list!), embarks on a trip to Italy with her father, which means she’s going to spend more time with him than she has in the past 17 years put together. That’s probably already true by the end of the epic train journey that takes them to Siena.

She is thrown into the strange world of wealthy British expats in Tuscany, which in fact feels quite similar to the world described in the Bertolucci movie Stealing Beauty, except that the rather likable heap of artists lounging round the pool in that movie is replaced with a not quite so sympathetic gang who are there to save their inherited wealth from the UK tax authorities.

Lara’s summer in Tuscany includes a wide and interesting range of experiences and emotions, and trying to make sense of them she reflects back to memories of her previous foreign adventure, an overland trip to India with her mother (which reminds us of the exotic flavours of Hideous Kinky although that one was set in Morocco).

Parts of the novel are disturbing enough to ensure it doesn’t end up on the “light summer reading” shelf, but still, the Tuscan sun does add to the reading pleasure, and teenage angst and confusion looks much more photogenic by the Love Falls (as in waterfalls) than in the dreary backyards of Peerless Flats, so I reckon for anybody who doesn’t know Freud’s work yet, Love Falls might be a good place to start.

PS: Other contemporaries on my list included writers Naomi Wolf and Federico Andahazi, actresses Juliette Binoche, Jane Horrocks and Jodie Foster, singer Tori Amos … actually, the list ist still online at my old website, untouched for nearly a decade.

decade of a domain

my first domain name, www.michaelgross.co.uk, is 10 years old today, so I'll take this as an excuse to post a brief history of my website, blog and associated activities. If nothing else, it shows how rapidly the online world has changed in the last 13 years.

History of Only Connect!

27.12.1996 learned HTML from a book.
30.12.1996 launched as Michael’s Home Page, then releasing a numbered issue every week. Main sections: Science; science communication; bilingual children. The site is hosted at the Oxford Centre for Molecular Sciences (www.ocms.ox.ac.uk).
13.1.1997 issue 3 appears with title “Only Connect!” Fourth section: miscellaneous eccentric ideas. Front page essentially a list of 4 sections and 4-5 subsections each, linking to specific pages. E.g. under science communication, there were links for my first books Nanoworld and Life on the edge, and one to the science journalism list.
29.12.1997 Issue 35 has 43 active files. Updates not necessarily weekly.
9.11.1998 Amazon.com associate.
19.4.1999 New section about Oxford (gargoyles, local authors …)
16.12.1999 registered domain name www.michaelgross.co.uk
3.1.2000 New design: front page now has images and titles to link to eight second level pages (each branching out to multiple third-level pages!): Life on the Edge, Nanoworld, Molecular Computation, Light and Life, journalism, bilingual children, books & music, links. Later added research as ninth second-level page.
12.5.2000 google affiliate (earning a fraction of a cent each time someone used google from my page, but it never added up to a payout!).
Jan 2001 joined associate programs of Amazon.de, .fr, .co.uk
Aut. 2001 moving out of Oxford University, site now hosted at Birkbeck crystallography (BBK).
18.10.2002 registered domain name www.proseandpassion.com
22.10.2002 backed up 150 html files, then redeveloped site with simplified structure and new style (using cascading style sheets). Front page now circle of eight icons (no text other than the “alt” text that appears when touching icon with mouse), rather than vertical list of icons plus text. Circle icons link to 4 books, plus pages called whoiam, journalism, research, prose and projects. The last one was soon replaced by a link to the Shakira page, developed Jan-Mar 2003. E.M.Forster quote now written across the top such that “the prose and the passion appears in the middle like a title.
Jan 2005 installed copy of site at geocities (main site still hosted at BBK).
10.4.2006 upgraded geocities to ad-free geocities-plus, pointed proseandpassion domain name at this.
Spring 2006 joined MySpace, started blogging there and on
10.5.2006 at yahoo 360.
11.5.2006 linked yahoo360 blog to geocities site, where it is mirrored in “red top version. Also joined and tried out blogger that month.
24.5.2006 moved michaelgross.co.uk domain to point at geocities site (stopped updating BBK site, which can still be seen here), pointed proseandpassion domain at yahoo360 blog.
10.7.2006 new front page with “book shelf” design. Slimmed down again, now only five second-level pages. (e.g.one for latest book and one for backlist, not one for every book). Title now “michael gross science writer”, with E.M.Forster quote in top right corner.
1.10.2006 all five second-level pages adapted to new structure.
28.2.2007 added family history page.
Summer 07 joined FaceBook.
2.7.2007 proseandpassion.blogspot.com becomes the main blog, with the proseandpassion domain name pointed at it. Blog posts copied manually to MySpace, and mirrored automatically in FaceBook.
14.5.2008 last entry in Yahoo360 / red top blog, as this has begun to function erratically, accepting only a fraction of the entries posted. All red top entries are still online today, at http://michaelgross.info/blog/index.html/.
Aut.2008 developed somewhat decluttered style for “platypus” page and gradually spread this style over the pages of the other books, e.g. linking to relevant blog label instead of having dedicated (and always out-of-date) “news and events” page.
July 2009 joined twitter as @michaelgrr.
Nov. 2009 Forced to move website to yahoo web hosting and new domain michaelgross.info following closure of geocities in October. Blog now has google page rank of 6/10 (when did that happen?) PR of website has dropped to 0 because of the move, though (it used to oscillate between 4 and 5 for the last few years).

archaeology of blogging

To my huge surprise, I've just discovered that the first incarnation of my blog (apart from the very first one on MySpace), which was hosted on the Yahoo360 / geocities network of sites has survived the demise of both yahoo360 and geocities. Apparently, blog entries have been moved, along with my website, to the new yahoo domain michaelgross.info.

I usually refer to it as the "red top" version of my blog, it ran from 10.5.2006 to 14.5.2008, with 503 entries, and the complete list of entries is here:

Prose and passion: the red-top version

So if any of my seven faithful readers should ever want to look up a vaguely remembered blog entry from the time before blogspot (i.e. older than summer 2007), that's where to find it. Please ignore the pedestrian design, though ...

PS one entry I just re-read is:

three reasons not to eat your partner

Darwin fatigue ?

It's the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the origin of species" today, but I'm not getting much of a celebratory vibe. OK, the display at the library is saying something about virtual Darwin day, and Nature has done the third special issue on Darwin in the year, but it's not even trending on twitter, so it can't really be happening. Or it's less important than New Moon and Christmas. Or everybody is suffering from Darwin fatigue after commemorating his work nearly all year long ? Time to move on to the 2010 anniversaries ?

Oh, hang on, not yet. My domain name www.michaelgross.co.uk is turning 10 next month, so I'll prepare something special for that. Be afraid ...

website news

As geocities closed down in October, I've had to move my website to the yahoo webhosting service. As part of the service, I'm also getting a domain name, which means that, in addition to www.michaelgross.co.uk, I now also have the domain name http://michaelgross.info/
Forwarding of traffic from www.michaelgross.co.uk to the new site seems to work. The address http://geocities.com/michaelgrr auto-forwards to the new name for the moment (but that may stop at some point, so if anybody has any links to the geocities address, please update them). Links to secondary pages, e.g. http://geocities.com/michaelgrr/journal.html will also auto-forward, but to the front page, and not to the specific page. So again, please adjust your links accordingly if you have any.

Oh, and in the brave new world of bit.ly, my web address is: http://bit.ly/1XVNXb or http://bit.ly/1v7bQK

The blog is unaffected by all this, physical address still proseandpassion.blogspot.com, and the domain name www.proseandpassion.com points at this.

While we are talking domain names, please note that I can not read email addressed to the domain names (such as michael@michaelgross.co.uk ) as both domain names attract hundreds of spams per day and I have been forced to target this traffic directly to the trash folder.

Also, as a novelty, I am now putting up a new title photo every month, like a good, old-fashioned wall calendar ...

PS I just noticed (Nov 5th) that the front page of my blog now has a google ranking of 6 (that's out of 10). How on earth did that happen ? Thanks to everyone who linked here !

slideshow widget

... moving on to somewhat more sophisticated widgets:

testing widgets

Now, let's see if I can get my head round these widgets. I copy over the code and you should be able to order my book from

amazon.com

or from

amazon.co.uk

or from

amazon.fr

or from

amazon.de



and I get the referral fee. Plus the stats of how many people actually did click on that link. At least that's how it worked back in 2000, when the system was much easier.

PS Amazon.co.uk assure me that the old-style links that I have all over my website should still work. So I'm relieved to know that I don't have to replace all of them with widgets.

front page platypuses

I've edited my front page in order to accommodate a direct link to my new book, which is out now.

In the UK, it can be ordered from (ranked by best availability)

Wiley (publisher)

Blackwell's

amazon.co.uk

Foyle's

Waterstone's

WHSmith

what's in a domain name

I remember when I first bought my domain name (way back in the 1990s) how excited I was that any email directed to any address ending in @michaelgross.co.uk would find me. Not that anybody did ever email me under "Iwannashout@michaelgross.co.uk" or similar.

Now I'm having second thoughts as the domain name attracts more than 30 spams per hour (and that's only the ones that get past the Yahoo spam guard, which used to be nearly perfect a couple of years ago!). After wasting a lot of time deleting spam I've been forced to filter the @michaelgross.co.uk mail to a separate folder, where I let it accumulate so I can admire the numbers going astronomical.

oh well. another internet dream gone bust. But the good news is that my proper email address is pretty clean since I fixed that problem.

dusting down the book shelves

I'm at the moment cleaning up the book pages of my web site. Using the slightly improved design of the new pages created for The birds, the bees and the platypuses, I've now blown the cobwebs off the pages for Astrobiology, Light and life, Lust and love as well and may keep working my way down the list, unless I get too bored with that.

I shouldn't click around on my own website, really, I always discover lots of things that need fixing ...

new look bookshelf

I've dusted down the book shelf on my home page, www.michaelgross.co.uk, a bit. Apologies to anyone who was confronted with a messed-up page yesterday, as I started off on the wrong foot ...

Testing, 1, 2, 3

Hey, let's see how this compares to MySpace and Yahoo360 blogs. Let's start with simple things such as posting a link to my home page:

http://www.proseandpassion.com

... seems to work.

Uploading an image from my website, too.