Welcome to the website for the 2016 Manx Telecom Parish Walk
I’ve been publishing the parishwalk.com website since 2001. At first it was primarily to publish the statistics on the walkers of the event, a database that even then was 20 years in the making. It was soon adopted by Manx Harriers, the organisers, as the official website and all of the walk literature and results have been published or linked here ever since.
Is was not long before photos become an integral part of the site and videos were added in 2007. Online entries soon followed as did several features a year on some of the characters taking part. Social media was added progressively, blogs at first and then Facebook and Twitter.
Last year Manx Telecom sponsored a huge enhancement to what was being offered online with the Pic2go photo service whereby walkers could elect to have photos taken by a team of volunteer photographers sent to their Facebook pages. I also invested with an upgrade to my isleofman.in photo site. The same photos as used by the Pic2go photo service, but in higher resolution, were tagged so that you could search by number for the first time. All profits from the isleofman.in website are donated to charity.
For this year, the big development has been to re-design the website in the most radical way. After 15 years of publishing using Namo Webeditor software, which was withdrawn about 5 years ago, I have switched to using WordPress. Although content is king, and it has taken a lot of time to re-link or republish the old content, I hope you find the layout pleasing too. It offers much more flexibility and I can add additional content much more easily without major changes.
The re-design has been achieved during one of the most challenging two week periods of my life as I have involved in so many other activities equally demanding and WordPress was new to me. I hope that this format will see me through the next 10 years.
My first Parish Walk finish aged 19 in 1976 when I was second to John Cannell. Also in the photo are the late Dennis Lace and Ian Turnbull.
With my long suffering wife Marie in July 2015