It's about time I explained my absence from the blogosphere.

As retirement approaches, I find myself increasingly engaged in private projects, in the hope - I suppose - that something will turn up that will keep me busy when I don't have to get out of bed to go to work. So when my niece asked me to look at her Web site, I was only too pleased ...

She's a writer, and it turns out that she has two sites. Her personal site relates to her writing activities: but she also runs a consultancy business, called UrbanWords, that has its own Web site. The former was already up and running, whilst the second was mainly at a planning stage.

When I first looked at it, Sarah's personal site was a complete mess. It had been produced using some Microsoft tools, failed every validity test in the book and simply didn't work in any other browser apart from Internet Explorer. So I agreed to correct it and to develop the consultancy site, using the same look and feel.

This in itself would not explain my prolonged absence. Neither site is particularly big or particularly complex. In fact, they were up and running within a couple of weeks - with every page passing the W3C validator tests at the XHTML 1.0 strict level. The real work arrived afterwards.

During the time the Sarah Butler and the UrbanWords sites were being implemented, Sarah won an Arts Council grant, partly financed with lottery money, to undertake a project that had as one of its deliverables a Web site. So I agreed to do that one as well.

The result is the A Place For Words site.

As you will see if you follow the link, this was a much bigger project and involved working with a graphics designer. The intention is to get this site into a Content Management System as soon as we can, so that Sarah can update the content of the site as time goes by. For this purpose, we chose the open source Joomla! application. So I've now acquired a small library of books about Joomla! and will be trying to move the site over the next few months.

All this has been quite a lot of work. I have had a very nice box of chocolates from Sarah out of it, though. It arrived totally out of the blue just before Sarah left on holiday recently: a hat-box shaped container with some of the most luxurious chocolates I've ever tasted. John Lewis partnership, it says on the label. Highly recommended.

So, what with three Web sites and the EPP module I blogged about yesterday, time has been a little short.

Oh! and I'm still learning French. Next month I go to Caen in Normandy for a one-week residential course. Carole and I will then meet up in Paris and have a few days there before returning to Cardiff in time for the Eisteddfod Genedlaethol (National Eisteddfod), that is taking place in the fields just across the road from where I work, this year.

The plan is to return to France this autumn, perhaps going to the south - Montpelier appeals. But we've no definite plans yet, so who knows. I guess it partly depends on how many Web sites I find myself developing ...