The original Attica web site, April 2005 to June 2008

A few words of introduction and explanation to readers new to this site: The original Attica site, launched as a platform for the writing of my books-in-progress and for the occasional rant (i.e. blog post), was published from an Apache web server on a Linux box in my attic (whence ‘Attica’) at home in Richmond upon Thames from April 2005 until June 2008. Neither the overall look’n’feel of the site nor the specific iconography has changed from the original 2005 design, itself based on an earlier ‘old newspaper’ style template I’d nicked from much admired elsewhere and then woven into WordPress.

Design: the top banner

The image top-left of the page is of encyclopédiste Denis Diderot; top-right, the sapere aude translates as ‘Dare to know’ or, more loosely, ‘Dare to think for yourself’. Originally used by Horace in his First Book of Letters (20 BCE), the phrase sapere aude became associated with the Age of Enlightenment after philosopher Immanuel Kant used it in the essay ‘Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’ (1784). Kant claimed the phrase as the defining motto for the Enlightenment, and used it to develop his theories of the application of Reason in the public sphere of human affairs.

It was not only the banks that crashed in 2008

Disaster struck Attica one wretched day in June 2008 when the hard drive, though almost new, failed irreparably and, although I’d backed up almost all content, I did not have a full back-up of the server.

I lost heart … lost interest … whatever … anyhow, ended up abandoning this personal site while building and maintaining others (and, this second time around, taking the precaution of using commercial hosting).

On and off over the past 12 years I’ve thought of perhaps resurrecting the site … and now feel much inclined to do so in August 2020.