Maintaining a Web site
by Chris

Knowing that we'd be making the trip of a lifetime, Silvia and I had agreed to keep a travel journal, both for ourselves as well as to keep in touch with our friends and family around the globe.
Having our very own web page quickly became a must, particularly after we'd seen the great work of other travelers and had benefited from the info we'd read during our year-long research. (see the "links" section for the pages that helped us most).

In her enthusiasm, Silvia left to me the honor of answering all the "techy-questions" such as:
- How to build a web site?
- How to publish it and where?
- Where to write a journal?
- How to keep the web site updates?

Reading thru various web sites was a great source of information, and inspiration which helped me resolve the many puzzles that could have kept me awake in the office.

Not having yet left holland, I cannot really tell how effective these methods are, but this is how we are planning to do it:

1) Building and publishing your own site
After shopping around the intricate web of hosting companies (each promising the lowest monthly rate, fastest data transfer, latest gimmicks and least commitment period) I decided to settle for free.fr which was offering me exactly what i wanted for... well... free
This great french company gives 100MB of storage space, unlimited aliases and email addresses, a great interface, imp web-based email, newsgroups, distribution lists and much more.
One of the restrictions of free.fr being that frontpage extensions are not accepted, I ventured into writing our page with macromedia Dreamweaver MX, even though I had no prior experience with such a comprehensive web design program.

A little help here and there, reading magazines, help files and web tutorials allowed me to start working on the site, mixing the layout of various pages that had appealed to me by their clarity, user friendliness and general structure.
We purposely chose not to buy the domain name camelontherun.com to givefree.fr credit on their great work and concept.

Web site as backup vault:
The space provided by free.fr also allowed us to store a backup of all our documentation online in case of loss of damage.
We have scanned all our important receipts, legalized copy of passports, driving licenses (nat + internat), paddis, certificates, Traveller Checks insurance papers, travel insurance contract etc. and placed them on a protected area of the site (as well as in other online "vaults" such as web-mails, freeserve drives etc.)
This is also the place to put any software or files that can be useful during the trip (bookmarks, travel notes, contact lists,.important numbers, palm backups, travel insurance claim forms...)

2) Updating the web site
It is relatively easy to do all the writing for the site before the big departure, when using familiar computers, programs and reliable internet connections.

Once on the road, things would be very much different , and we wanted to make sure that we had almost everything covered:
a) Writing while on the road: Not wanting to spend hours on end copying our handwritten notes in cramped sweaty internet cafes, we had to find a way to write on a digital media which is quickly and easily transferable onto an email.
Taking a proper PC was quickly ruled out due to its questionable portability and its thief "magnetability". We decide to settle for my good old handspring visor palm PDA, enriched with a few gadgets:
- Targus full size foldable keyboard: light, compact, and still the best keyboard for PDA's
- Memplug SmartMedia card expansion slot (portableinnovation.com): module that fits at the back of the handspring and takes SmartMedia cards for backup, file copying etc.
- Flashpath SmartMedia floppy adaptor: floppy size disk that reads a SmartMedia on any computer
- GP NiMH rechargeable batteries
- 3x16MB SmartMedia cards for multiple backups

The concept is simple and can be done with any palm device (all brands that either have a built-in removable storage media (palm, toshiba, blueberry) or external extension slot like the visor (end of lifed by now, but who cares, we're world travelers, not techno-yuppies anymore!). This is how it'll work:
- Use keyboard to type stories onto palm using wordsmith (www.bluenomad.com, buy it, don't crack it!). Wordsmith had the advantage of creating its files as separate distinguishable .pdb file
- Copy the desired .pdb file onto the SmartMedia card (with the program that comes with the palm or with Memplug)
- At a friendly internet cafe, transfer the .pdb file to the pc.
For that we can either use the FlashPath floppy adaptor or, if the PC is modern enough to have a usb port, the usb connection of the Fuji S602 digital camera which can hold both SmartMedia and Compact Flash cards.
For the floppy option, we will need to install the small program that allows the pc to read the FlashPath, and that is why a "friendly" internet cafe is highly recommended.
We'll take the installation diskette with us (though we could also download the 300kb program from the Scandisks' site).
Once the software installed and the PC rebooted (did I mention that the internet cafe should be friendly and allow rebooting their machines?), we will transfer our . pdb file onto the pc, and convert it onto a text file using a small dos program (PalmDoc converter, 40kb freeware from TwoCows.com) which we keep on both the SmartMedia card and on the documents backup section of our web site.
This program runs directly from dos without need for installation.
the conversion is super easy and produced a .txt file which can be cut'n'pasted in an email.

Et Voilà, that's all it takes, two minutes work, saving us a lot of typing and copying time, and allowing us to use our online session for quality email reading, travel research, or sending the written material to the various recipients.

b) Updating the web site while on the road
There is nothing easier than updating the web site when on the road: just ask someone else to do it for you :-)
We were lucky to have my mom accept this daunting task. (thanks mom, i love you)
We'll send her our stories (as well formatted and edited as possible) which she will further beautify and upload them on the web site, eventually with some of the pictures that we'll send by email/CD-ROM).
My mom not being a web expert herself, I have tried my best to make the web site as difficult as possible to screw up by using fixed size tables, protected areas, server site includes and templates etc.
A couple days extensive training sessions were enough for her to be comfortable with both the web and picture editing programs.

coming soon: the reality of criss's theories.