About

I am Bill Hunter and this is my Blog.
It was begun early in October 2020.
That was about eight months into the pandemic.

The name "Bill's Beard" was chosen because it is alliterative, my quarantine beard was then luxuriant... and that's the only name that came to mind at the time.
In fact my beard was bigger and bushier than it had ever been before.

Its length became a measure of the time I'd spent in isolation and as it grew the more reluctant I became to undo all of the good work by shaving.
I reckon it's a beard of pleasingly uniform shade and splendid coverage.
With well-defined edges and totally free of unsightly patches it must surely be the envy of many a failed beardy!

Over the summer of 2020 my garden, a series of DIY projects and providing websites for the cuesports community kept me occupied, but with the onset of winter and no prospect of getting out of the house in the foreseeable future I decided to try my hand at blogging.

Around that time I'd also become increasingly exasperated with the content of social media, or more precisely Facebook.

Twitter remains just about tolerable, but Facebook is a grim and unpleasant place to visit.

Possibly my age is a factor, but blogging has proved far more time-consuming and challenging than I'd anticipated.

I'm not a good writer.

My writing style is long-winded, laboured and lacks humour.

I get bogged down trying to decide upon the ideal choice of words and frequently refer to a thesaurus.

I don't recall having such difficulties as a university student in St.Andrews.
It's possible my writing style is better suited to academic work.

Hopefully my blogging technique will improve with practice and my posts become more readable.

To construct my blog I've used Google Blogger.

It is a free and secure blogging platform.

I've posted some thoughts on the pros and cons of creating a blog with Blogger.

My blog has three main menu headings...

• "BLOG" which unsurprisingly takes visitors to my home page where readers can scroll through links to all posts.
  
  
• "ABOUT" is the menu selection which links directly to the page you are currently reading.
  
  
• "INDEX" directs readers to a page listing every blog post title from the latest to oldest.

The website sidebar includes what I've called an "Extended Menu" which further categorises blog topics.

In addition there's a sidebar gadget linking archived posts under year and month of publication.

Every blog page has a header image which reflects that post's content.
Those images have been 'cartoonised' before publishing using online software.

A 'lightbox' comes with Blogger which means when images are selected by the reader they fill the screen as an overlay on top of the blog post.

Most recently I've been compiling a Hunter Family Tree.
My ancestors come from the coal mining communities of Prestonpans and Lochgelly in Scotland and given that my great grandparents William and Isabella Hunter had thirteen children there's plenty to research and keep me occupied.

There's a blog page listing what's known about the Hunter Family History in Lochgelly.

Although this blog is located at williamalberthunter.blogspot.com the address billhunter.uk takes you to the same destination.
It is a little easier to remember.

At the foot of each post there's an option to share or to make a comment.
There's also a contact form at the bottom of the blog page.