Victory!

Although Josie and Lori have moved school, I've been keeping in contact with the parents at their old school. That's partially because the girls have friends there, partially because I have friends there among the parents, but also because of an ongoing campaign that I feel very passionately about.

That campaign was to stop planning permission being granted to turn the building next door into flats. Well, I say next door, it actually shares the playground. What that would have meant was that single-aspect studio flats would have a clear view into the playground, at ground level, which was just unacceptable for the children's privacy. That wasn't the only issue with the development, but it was a very sizeable one.

I was involved at the start of the campaign, less so latterly, but the baton was taken up admirably by other parents, with the support of local councillors, especially Nick Gardner, and our local MSP, Malcolm Chisholm.

Today those mentioned above, among others, spoke at the development committee where planning matters are decided. The result, despite the recommendations of the planning department, was a vote against permission being granted. It was by the narrowest of margins, but it was still a victory, and I am so pleased for the parents at Broughton Primary who have worked so hard for this result.

You can read more about it here.

Well done to everyone involved!

A New Adventure in Coding

Learning New Things

Games Review , the site that I edit on Hubgarden.com is going quite well, and starting to build some momentum. I'm also building up a library of articles as a writer on Weekend Notes and MyKidCraft, However, I don't want to just edit and write for other peoples' sites.

So, I've decided that if I want to start my own website, then I need to learn how to code, if only to understand what the challenges will be and how little I actually know. It's a stroke of luck, then, that my blogger interface doesn't appear to work with this version of IE and so I have to use the HTML tab to write the thing. I'm going to continue to thinking of it as a stroke of luck, as that stops it from being so annoying that the admins won't let me have a decent browser.

That's really all my chat about that. Well, not quite. I suppose I'd better illustrate that I am actually learning something, and put all this Codeacademy stuff into practice. So far, I've learned about:

• Titles, Headers, Paragraphs
• Image links and URL links
• Lists
1. Ordered Lists
2. Unordered Lists

So far, so surprisingly easy. It still all looks rubbish though, it took me 5 minutes to work out why I had a stray bullet point in my unordered list up there, and then get rid of it. So, how do I go from that, to making a site that looks more stylistically attractive? I'm not sure yet...but watch this space to find out when I do!