Tuesday, March 19, 2024, 9:21am

SNAPP HAPPY was originally published in 2002 simply as a means of sharing travel adventures and gaining experience in web design. The site has grown since then and features details & photographs of visits to some exotic locations around the world, macro/close up photography (my latest hobby), free web templates (my other hobby), & lots of links to web design resources which have proved very useful to me in the building of this website.

About Denise

me I was born and educated in Hartlepool, a town on the north-east coast of England. After leaving school in the early 70's I worked in the chemical industry as a lab technician for a couple of years before leaving to start a family. Shortly after the birth of my son Martin I decided to return to work and also a complete career change. I began work as a Postal Officer in 1980 and remained in that post for the next eight years. After a short spell working as a Health Physics monitor at Hartlepool nuclear power station I returned to the Post Office on a part-time basis. In 2001 I retired on health grounds and I now enjoy being a full-time housewife. I had a lot of spare time on my hands after leaving work and this is where my interest in web design began. I had been wondering what to do with our holiday photographs, which were just gathering dust in cupboards around the house, when Paul suggested putting them up on a web site. I liked the idea but didn't have a clue where to start. After doing a lot of 'Googling' to find information on how to build a web site I installed Dreamweaver and set about the task. Unfortunately I just couldn't get to grips with this software and after many weeks of pulling my hair out I gave up! I decided that the way forward was to teach myself HTML so that I could do the coding myself for my web site. I bought a book at the local computer fair ('SAM'S:Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours') and together with bookmarks to some tutorials on the internet I began. In 2002 I published my first web site and thought I was the 'bees knees'! That was until I started to hear words like:- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), validation, cross-browser friendly and accessibility. At that time I didn't even know there were other browsers out there. I thought everybody used IE. Blimey! You learn something new every day! Anyway, I downloaded Firefox and when I saw my web site I was appalled. It just didn't look anything like it did in Explorer. It didn't validate, bits that worked in Explorer didn't work in Firefox, the list goes on ...... it was a total mess!! That's when the learning really began. It was a steep learning curve and there were times when I wanted to give up on the idea of a web site altogether but, with encouragement from Paul, I continued. This web site is the product of that learning and, whilst it may not be perfect in every way, I am very proud of it.

About Paul

Paul In addition to having a (sometimes too) busy career, Paul also has a number of leisure interests. His interest in football was nurtured into him as soon as was humanly possible and he was dragged along to football matches at such a young age that he can't remember when his first match was. It's a bit of a Dad-Son thing I suppose. All these years later he is a season ticket holder at the local football club, all of his own accord! Music was also an early interest, but hey, how could it not have been? He was, after all, a child of the sixties! Unlike football, he shares this interest with me, but don't expect anything too conventional. If Kevin Coyne, Robert Fripp, Peter Hammill, Roy Harper and Richard Thompson are names that ring bells, then you will get a picture of his preferences. In recent years he has also developed a liking for the pioneering blues and jazz performers. Photography has also been an enduring interest. Unfortunately, this indulgence is usually restricted to holiday periods these days. Some examples of holiday snaps are on show on this site. Paul's interest in computers started at university. After several Commodore 64 years a new era of cheap PC's and graphical user interfaces helped develop his interest to the point of building home PC's and networks. The icing on the cake is the development of this domain, mitchinson.net. Fortunately, he shares this interest with me and it is my design that is on display on this site. He has other interests as well, including motor racing (which I don't like) but that should give you a flavour.

Meet the Family Cats

Jenny Tom We adopted Tom & Jenny from the local cat orphanage in June 2001. We had lost our other cat eighteen months previously at the age of 18 and I was so upset I cried for days. When it happened I was adamant I didn't want another cat, after all, how could we possibly replace Whiskey, he was a very special cat. But after a while I realised that home didn't feel quite like home without a cat curled up in front of the fire so we decided to get another cat. Well ... two cats as it turned out (brother & sister) and I wouldn't be without them.

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Meet the Family

This photograph is of my son Martin, his wife Jane and daughter Josie. Click on the photograph below to see more wedding pics.

my family




The Wedding Video

On December 2nd 2006 my son Martin married Jane. Below is a shortened version of the wedding video which I thought would be nice to add to my web page so that friends and relatives who couldn't make the wedding can watch.

** NOTE: Windows Media Player is required to view the video. The video filesize is quite large (16mb) and may take some time to load if you have slow connection speed. Probably not recommended if you have a 56k modem.

Click here to view the Wedding Video

Charlotte

my family

Charlotte, my granddaughter, will be celebrating her first birthday on 20th March. This is one of my favourite photographs of her.

Brother Bob's Blog

my family For the past 5 years my brother-in-law, Robert (Bob) Mitchinson, has been sailing around Central America and the west coast of Mexico, visiting places such as Costa Rica and Guatemala. He is heading off to Panama next and expects to leave Puerto Jiminez in Costa Rica very soon (end Feb 2007). If anyone out there fancies doing what he has done ie. giving up the day job! and sailing off into the sunset, then you may find his blog SVHorizons very interesting.