i am sparticus: About

About

Mark Walley

iamsparticus.com is written, directed and scored by Mark Walley, a 20ft tall fire-breathing robot. He's known for his ability to fight off invading monsters, a post-modern fashion sense and a general disdain for all blue foodstuffs. He's not quite sure where he's going with this.

In reality my full name is Mark Nathan Walley, I'm 28 years old and I'm currently a full time youth worker for a church based youth and community centre in central London. With my life right now I'm doing the following things: Getting used to central London, drinking lots of coffee, reading books, trying to get to rock concerts, badly mangling web code, pretending to be cool, drinking real ale, making comments that I think are witty and generally being a bit of an idiot. That's a lot of things for one person, but I try and cope with it all.

The name Sparticus comes from a long tradition of names given to me. This one however, stuck in some quarters, therefore it sticks on this website. History makes a mockery of us all.

I'm a reasonably devout Christian, of the evangelical tendency. That means I like God, read the bible and want to see you converted. Run to the hills!

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If you think this website is far too much about me and not enough about anyone else (or about you), then you can always stop reading it. Or start your own one up to balance out the internet or something. Personal websites tend to contain personal anecdotes and stories and I make no apologies for that here. Other than that though, I hope you enjoy everything on this site and make lots of good happy friends.

This Site

This site has been in existence on one domain or another for almost five and a half years now. If this website was a child it would have been in school for a year or so and would already be able to write lower and upper case letters and tie its own shoe-laces. From my estimations the site will finally get its j's dotted and the right way round by about 2012.

The main feature of this site is the regularly updating words that I write. I say stuff and things and people make comments on them. It doesn't sound like much, but that's probably because it isn't. A better explanation of how to navigate the writings and all other content can be found on the navigation page. Other than that you should be aware that there a whole bunch of secret hidden features on this site, that can only be discovered by poking and prying around. I think I've forgotten some of them already, so be sure to let me know if you find one.

In case you didn't notice the header image of this site changes depending on where the entry I wrote was written, or at what stage of my life it was written. So if the entry was written in London, then it'll be a photo of the tube or something and if it was written in Swansea then it'll be a photo of rain or something. Lets hope I go more photogenic places soon.

Colophon

This is the bit for the geeks. I coded this site for sometime in Smultron (which is good for a free program) before buying a slightly more shiny text editor, TextMate. I use Cyberduck for FTP and Macromedia / Adobe Fireworks MX 2004 for graphics. If you're really cool you'll have noticed all those programs are for a Mac. This is because I'm lucky enough to own a G4 iBook that I do all my work on. It's a wonderful wonderful thing.

Server-side I use MovableType to push all the content into pages and some fun PHP and MYSQL trickery to get some of the more interesting features to work. I'm hosted with Site5 who are very very good. If you want to know how the code to anything I do here works then e-mail me and I'll probably send you the source code.