About the Authors

Jon Hill

Jon has been a fan of rocks since A-level geology. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, obtaining a degree in Geophysics. He then went on to do a Masters degree in High Performance Computing at EPCC, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center. Then, just for a change, he moved back to the School of GeoSciences at Edinburgh to study for a PhD. The PhD research is based around a forward model of carbonate production, which he has to write...write papers on...test...do case studies with... Good job he has 3 years to do this. This strange individual is the brains behind all the fancy code that runs this site, so if anything breaks, blame him.

Katie Davis

Katie is a fossil freak! She studied A-level geology then went onto the University of Edinburgh to study Geology. She went to Bristol University to do a Masters degree in Palaeobiology. Currently Katie resides in an office in Glasgow University carrying out a PhD in bird evolution. She likes to spend the wee hours looking at cladograms, trying to work out how birds (extinct and not-so-extinct) are related.

About the Site

Geoogyrocks was first thought of on a mapping trip in Sweden, 2001. Originally called Geolearn (hmm...catchy name!), the site's basic design was constructed and written in ASP. It was an offshoot of J & K - a site that contained geology tutorials, amongst articles on the mythology on vampires! Searching for a host we realised that Windows hosting was expensive...hmmm. Jon then learned PHP (just for fun you see) and the site was completely re-written in PHP in the summer of 2002. It then languished on the hard drive of the computer, having bits and pieces added, until December of 2002. We bought host space with a small company call MyITHost...which went out of business. It was bought by what is now ArteryPlanet.Net, which screwed up the moving of servers, losing 3 months of data (tutorials, posts, members - everything!). That contract ran out in January 2004 and it took us until May 2004 to get the site back up on some new servers. While the site was down we added a glossary and DinoScene - just to make the site even better :-D

• 1st June, 2004 - Opened the site to the public on the new hosts.
• 11th July, 2004 - Validated site against the HTML 4.01 Transitional standard. All pages but the forum are valid and should display nicely in any browser. Let us know if it doesn't. Changed the DinoScene Java applet to work with Java 1.3 and above (rather than 1.4) and fixed a bug that stopped the popup windows working with Internet Explorer.

As you can see from the history of the site, we are just two people - not an academic institution. In the past we've had requests for brochures, cash and information on courses we run. We will not respond to any such requests. We are two PhD students on NERC studentships - we have no cash! In fact, we need cash to pay to run this site (hence the Amazon ads), so if you would like to donate, please get in touch ;-)