The Who, What, When, and Where
Well lets start off by who I am, my name is Barry Peterson, I was born and raised in the province of Alberta Canada, and I continue to live here in the south-central region with my wife, son and our two cats Casey and Moonie. Online I also go by the name Shaftsbury. People have asked me about the origin of my screen name, the truth is that it started out as a character I developed for an online RPG called Baldur's Gate. It is a classic roleplaying game that came out in 1998 and was developed by a fledegling software company from Edmonton, Alberta called Bioware. The character name and other names that I used for my roleplaying website all came from another one of my hobbies, fossil collecting. Shaftsbury (changed from Shaftesbury), Ravenscrag, and several other names I have used for characters over the years all come from geologic formations found in my home province of Alberta. The "Shaftesbury" formation is a mid Cretaceous layer characterized by friable shale, fish scale siltstone, bentonite, and ironstone, and is found in the Peace River country of Alberta. Another name that you see frequently on my roleplay site is "Ravenscrag", which is a late Cretaceous to Tertiary layer composed of of arenaceous claystone, with sandstone and coal interbeds, and is found in south-western Saskatchewan and the Cypress Hills area of Alberta.

As you can probably tell, much of my spare time revolves around my 3 main hobbies Fossil Collecting, Genealogy, and Web Design. The latter has allowed me to reach out on the web in ways that I never would have dreamed of back in 1993 when I bought my first computer. I have been doing web design since late 2000 when I first started playing Baldur's Gate online. My online friends and I needed a place where we could share ideas, stories, and schedule our games. At first my web sites were extremely simple and were hosted on free services such as "Yahoo" and "Geocities". My first domain was "Ravenscrag.net" which hosted a decent message forum and had a fair bit of background information on my RPG group and background information that had been developed for our online fantasy world. My first domain suffered from slow servers and occassional outages even though our uptime had been "guaranteed" by the web host. In 2005 I moved my website to a new domain ( Aledeon.net ) and a new web host with much faster and more reliable servers. If you are wondering, the name Aledeon is a word I borrowed from one of the online fantasy language sites. In "Elven" the word Aledeon is supposed to mean "avenue of trees", which seemed appropriate when I was creating the background locations for my roleplay group.

Web Design by Shaftsbury
Web Design by Shaftsbury is a small family run business that I created a couple of years ago. At the time I had been given the tender to build and manage the website for the Town of Bassano. I still consider web design a bit of a hobby for me even though I do have several clients that employ me on a fairly regular basis. Desert Sales

The Isles of Aledeon - Roleplay World
This project seems to have a life of it's own, just when I think the Roleplay forums have flickered their last, someone new comes along and stirs up the embers :) Kudos to my ever faithful moderators Katie and Sarah, without their help and patience the forums would have retired a long time ago. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with roleplaying, it is basically acting. Players take on the persona of a character, developing a background for that character and then interacting with other players through that character. Typically on a roleplay site, there is a specific timeline or theme for the roleplay, and the characters must work within that framework. Our site is based on a fictional world that I created back in the early 2000's. The style of our play is similar to what you would find in most Dungeon & Dragons style roleplay. For more information please visit the site.