This is the Website of Purlogue Green Farm

I've had this website for a few years, originally when living at Village Farm in Bleddfa (that explains the website name) before moving to Purlogue on the Powys/Shropshire border, and have only recently found a use for it !

I decided to try to teach myself a few website techniques. Initially just HTML for basic web page construction.

Then, as I found myself with a few sheep to look after I thought an "on-line" database for recording the flock details would be interesting. So, started learning MySQL and PHP. As happens with many of my projects, the Flock database gets to "nearly complete" and then, as I find more ways of doing things (or things not working quite right), I start over again. As I'm composing this page the 6 ewes are in the barn for lambing (so far 3 pairs of twins and 1 single have arrived, only 2 left to lamb) and I'm finding little tweaks I need for the database. Hopefully the database will be able to output records in a format acceptable to DEFRA.

An update... 1st May 2008. All 6 ewes have had their lambs now, last one was Boris, born to Olivia on 28th April.

This has spurred me on to make more changes to the on-line database, adding a section for medication records - another requirement, this for the State Veterinary Service (SVS). And I'm going to create a "Diary of Events" too. I'd tried a blog for the diary section but found that was just too much and I'll just write something simple using PHP/mySQL.

Bank Hiliday Monday, 26th May. Been doing some more work on the layout of the website and have managed to replace many of the "table" tags I'd been using for page layout to "div" tags (I'm told it's the correct method). I've also been making more use of a "Cascading Style Sheet" (CSS) to control how things look. I've tested the layout using Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Flock and Netscape but had to employ a "box hack" so Internet Explorer 6 displays things properly

I'll be working on the database section next, employing the same techniques. Also, a "diary" section - I'd initially tried a blog (Wordpress) for this but it seemed to be a bit of overkill for my simple requirements.

Lost one of the lambs last week, she'd contracted "Gid". Technical name is "Coenurosis" and it's usually contracted from grass contaminated by dog/fox fouling.