I'm Ryan. Enchanté.
Welcome to my little corner of the interwebs.
About me
My name is Ryan. I am a father — my kids are all adults now — and I work for a large Australian charity called the Starlight Children’s Foundation. I work in digital marketing and specialise in email marketing development. Being a web geek is one of the primary motivations behind building and keeping this blog. The other is my love of fishing, camping, cycle touring, hiking and otherwise “Getting Out There” (yagedditnow?!).
I live in a regional city of Victoria, Australia called Ballarat. Ballarat was built during the Victorian Gold Rush and the local saying here is “Old, Gold & Cold” but I love it. I can fish for trout two kilometres from my house. It takes me 5–10 minutes’ cycling to find myself on country roads surrounded by sheep, cattle, potatoes and eucalypt forests. Yes, the winters are cold, but the summers are so mild and lovely that it’s well worth braving the cold. Besides, I mean “cold” in the Australian sense: it gets down to 0°C. Europeans laugh at us. Feel free to join them.
About this blog
This blog is dedicated to my adventures in the great outdoors, fishing trips, hiking routes, camping, travelling, etc. as well as a collection of thoughts and interests.
When I’m not fishing, working or cycling, I entertain a few little hobbies such as leather- and wood-working, and I hope to have a selection of some of my works on here as well.
About privacy
OK, this bit is long and gets ranty, but that’s because I’m passionate about this subject.
This site is part-blog, part-profile, part-thought-dump. The latter is what a blog is, traditionally. And this is more your traditional style of blog, rather than somewhere where I’m hoping to flood you with AI-created content and ads in some vainglorious attempt at feeding myself and being “influential” or a “thought leader”. Fuck all that.
I just want somewhere to lay it all out, share my adventures to those who might find them useful, provide an avenue for people to connect with me if they so wish, and otherwise share some small part of myself.
It’s easy for me because I’m a digital marketer and web developer by trade. So this little labour of love costs me nothing but some small pittance for hosting a simple static Hugo site on a VPS and paying for a domain that I already needed for other projects. And the development and maintenance itself is fun/practice. If you don’t know what any of that means, that’s OK. It basically means I do not need or intend to make any money from you to cover my costs, because I have few, and because I hate that kind of business model: one simply starts writing/talking about what sells, not what they’re actually into or passionate about. You will never be my business model.
You are my honoured guest, nothing more, nothing less.
Like I said above, I’m a digital marketer. I could keep you up at night with tales of what marketers can do with your personal, identifiable digital data. It really is quite scary.
None of that here though. I don’t even have Google Analytics or any of that. No cookies. No measurements. I don’t know if you like/dislike my content unless you tell me. If you do, please do. I’d like that. But it’s your choice.
I do have a fair bit of Javascript on the page, but that’s strictly for presentation (like my procedurally-generated landscape device in the header and dividers) and some small forms. You’re not tracked in any way by myself. I intend to post my forms code on here soon so you can check for yourself (I just need to actually write the code first! 🤣).
It should go without saying that if you do share personal details in the forms you submit to me, I’ll of course know that stuff. So think twice before you do that. I don’t track IP addresses. I have some spam-protection processes in place but that’s all on my end, and does not compromise your data in any way.
I don’t even know what browser you’re using because I scrub that shit from my logs. I don’t want to know. If you’re using a crappy old browser and getting a bad experience on my site, tough shit, download a good one and join us jolly fellows in 2024.