When I first started building websites in the 90s, it was a GHASTLY business.  I soon learned my lesson that html, like stop-frame animation, wasn't for this girl with the attention span of a rodent.

The awful bore of setting it all up, then discovering half way through that I had missed some small detail or massive component out of all the pages and having to go through them all, one by one, dealing with unwieldy frames, and then having to confront the whole horrible mess every so often when updates needed doing was too much and I lost the will to live in the internet.

Then some clever coding types invented blogger and b2evolution and wordpress and typepad and livejournal and xanga, and a bunch of others I didn't try out, and I was sucked back into the world of websites, merely needing to tinker with html and css and php and not having to build things from scratch with them.  Lovely.  If you've followed my website(s) over the last few years, you'll have noticed that I just can't stop messing about ... I usually do something rash to my template or whole system at midnight, then have to spend the next few hours fixing it, knowing that the whole of civilization will collapse if my idiotic website isn't back online by the morning.

For a long time, I had the idea of Unkempt Women.  I still have drawings that were going to be the buttons and logos for the site on a sketchbook from about six years ago. As wonderful an innovation that blogging software was to the clueless and semi-clueless, though, it still was not that flexible, if you buggered about as much as I wanted to AND if you wanted multiple authors and didn't have a super php bod on your friend list.

Then one day, I came across joomla.  I think it was just because it was offered as an easy install by my ISP that I tried it for some site or other that I was playing around with, and decided that was the future for MY website.   It was instant love.  As usual, when a girl falls in love with something, she can't stop tinkering with it, nor can she stop talking about it.  I was surprised, though, at how few people I mentioned joomla to who have never even heard of it, nor its similar, but different CMS (content management system), Drupal, and it is still the case that joomla, outside of a certain community of semi-nerds (like me) and uber-coding-geeks (not like me) seems to be not very well known at all.  Which is a shame.  It's open source (always a commendable trait), free (even better), has a huge help community (invaluable), and is constantly in development and means that with a tiny bit of knowledge (like me) you can look really REALLY clever on the internet, without actually being THAT clever.  Which is rather lovely.

This site is built in joomla, of course, with an extension called K2, which makes it even more malleable for multiple authors.  Try it.  It's not that hard and your friends on the internet will just think you're SO clever.

It's not just all the climate change denialists that are coming out of the woodwork, grasping at every straw to prove their point; nor the greenalists who don't believe that anyone can question their proclamations; nor the rest of us in the middle, who find it hard to be a reactionary for either side (how ludicrous to have SIDES in the face of such an important problem), worried that we will be laughed at if proved wrong; nor the detracting and pointless argument about whether this is man-made or not; nor the preposterous machinations that the politicians at the Copenhagen summit will go through to prevent them making a single damn decision, proposal, treaty, whatever. It's a big fat combination of all of us filling a big balloon of stupid.

It's worth a punt, isn't it

My friend Wally Torta felt he needed to create a sister site to unkempt women.

I love Wally Torta.

Welcome to Unkempt Women, where a bunch of invited special laydees have come together to do internet stuff that they don't normally do and sometimes to revive a few things that need a breath of fresh air from the archives.  Read more about the whys and whats here.

The look and feel of the site will evolve as it finds its feet and I have time to tinker.

Stick us in your RSS reader, follow us on twitter @unkemptwomen, bookmark us in your browser, and come back often.  There are already about 20 members of the site, and there will be more invitees joining in as 2010 hurtles towards us.  I will SOON be making a mobile version of the site, so I can read the site in bed on my iphone... and you too.

'79 there he is with his arm around me, and there I am, radiant and happy.  I can still feel his arm on my shoulder.

Then look at '80.  Just look how far David Wilkie and I grew apart in just a year... he claimed he didn't remember me... can you imagine?  Look at my face, already resigned to the crapitude of men  He is wearing the same tshirt as the first time we met, though, so maybe it was a sign, a subtle "We'll always have Stevenage, Lucy, my love" tshirt sign.

My swimming club drove all the way from North Devon to Stevenage in a minibus for that first "Swimalong with David Wilkie".  What were they thinking?

Gawd, he was a good looking fellah, wasn't he?

At least I have the memory of his moustache in glorious technicolour in the 1980 one.

This is Unkempt Women, a site where a bunch of not-normal ladies write and draw and think and create whatever they damn well please....