Hello. We launched our Website coverage of the 2010 Reunion with the last edition. But now we can also bring you a photo gallery of the Summer event we held last year, when we got together to paint the town red – or, actually, not. We were out in force but we were very well-behaved on our Nottingham ramble. Publication of these splendid photos by Jeff Mann has been very much delayed by other pressures on the website’s manpower, in particular the organisation and publicity for this year’s reunion. But better late than never, I trust you’ll allow. So click the “Summer 2009” button above to see how much fun we can have when we get together or remind yourself how much fun we did have. And then check out the full details of our upcoming Reunion. This will be held on Saturday, 11^th September at the Portland College and as usual it will take the form of a CleWS lunch, with lots of time afterwards to meet old and new friends and swap stories. And our chairman will doubtless make a speech – at our last reunion the room layout made that rather difficult. Click the “Reunion 2010” button above.

Booking for this event is now closed, but we’re leaving the details on the site until after the event in case anyone attending needs to check anything. If you tried to book too late and you want to explore any possibility of a late entry email Pat Tavner at events@carltonlewillowsgs.org.uk - give a 'phone number and see what she says. There’ll be problems with arrranging your menu choices, but you never know. And next time, book earlier!

Pat tells me that Stuart Robinson, who joined the School in the same year as she did and who attended the 2007 reunion with his wife, looked at our photo gallery of that event while booking his places for this one. He’s emailed to say he’s disappointed at how little an impression he must have made while at School, since his wife is identified in one photo with her name mis-spelled as “Pobinson” and he isn’t identified at all in the next photo.

Well, Stuart, it’s like this.

Firstly, your wife’s name was and is correctly spelled on the site, but your browser may not be rendering the tail of the “R” very clearly. Unfortunately web designers have very little control over how browsers and monitors render text and colours: they depend on the browser and user settings. Perhaps the white text on a black background doesn’t help, but it sets off the photos to best effect. Sorry it didn’t work for you. And I suppose with a name like “Robinson” you don’t often have trouble with your name being mis-spelled – you should try having a name like “Pikett”. Even my spell-checker wants to change it.

But secondly, you are right to suppose I didn’t recognise you from School, and I apologise for that. But it’s a fact of life: you were a much younger kid than I was and you were a boy. I remember and recognise many fellow scholars from younger years, but they were all girls. Funny, that.

I’ve changed the caption to identify you, I hope correctly.

Now to repeat some bad news, certainly for Firefox users but probably for anyone who doesn’t use Microsoft’s own browser. Please pay attention. On some pages, you are not seeing the images or links that should appear. Several of you have found a problem and have told me about it but without giving enough information for me to suspect a single cause. I’ve also seen some worrying information from the website statistics on “pages not found” – where a page can’t be sent to you and the site sends you an error page. It also keeps a note of what you were looking for. In this case, a rising number of browsers are expecting to find a supporting file which simply isn’t there. I now see that the problem applies to all the pages on the site which were generated by Microsoft Word. I used Word originally to build the site for convenience and because I’d been asked to design the site so that other members of the committee could manage their own sections independently of me: they all have Word on their machines. That bit didn’t work: no-one came forward to take part.

When it works, generating these pages using Word is very quick. But there are a lot of situations where it doesn’t work very well, or at all, and so now about half the site is prepared that way and half in hand-written HTML. It’s the ‘Word’ half that is causing the problem.

I discovered that as it was set up on my machine Word was using something it calls “Vector Manipulation Language” (don’t ask) to handle images. It didn’t usefully point that out or explain what it meant. When we started, pretty much the only browser in use by anyone visiting this site was Internet explorer, so there were no reported problems. With the well-deserved rise in popularity of Firefox, however, it became clear that the only browser I could now find that can handle these vector thingies is IE.

The better news is that by switching the vector monster off and re-compiling the relevant pages, the problem goes away – this page is written with Word and Firefox users will, I hope, be able to see the image of a chicken in a car top left. But the pages are slower to download. There are a lot of other “Word” pages on the site and it will take me months to review them all. So: I’m very sorry that the site wasn’t working properly up to now, and sorry to have to ask you this: for the time being, if a page on the site looks wrong to you in Firefox, please re-visit the site using Internet Explorer if you can.

Roger Pikett September 2010

If you’re visiting for the first time, welcome. We hope you enjoy what you find here. We hope you’ll contribute to the site, too: post a message for everyone to read (click Common Room on the left) or send us copy, images, or raw information to add to the features we have already. I’m Roger (‘Prof’) Pikett, a founder pupil at the School and a member of the CLeWS committee. You can email me at the site: webmaster@carltonlewillowsgs.org.uk. The site now has two domain names – the official one is “carltonlewillowsgs.org.uk”, while the other is “carltonlewillows.org.uk”. This was done because many surfers leave off the “gs”. Though you can reach the website using either name, our email addresses all use the official name, with “gs” at the end, only.

www.carltonlewillowsgs.org.uk