Technical Details on How this Site was Built During the Voyage
- How much time did this take? Perhaps 2 hours per port is all I invested. I did most of my work between the time we docked in a port and the time we were "cleared" to leave the ship. Then we needed to find an Internet Cafe that would allow the use of floppy disks, sometimes a tall order. See below.
- The photos were all shot on digital video (not a digital camera per se) using a Sony 510 Digital 8 camcorder (highly recommended! A new model 520 has removable memory sticks). A DV camcorder will also work, but I have a lot of 8mm tapes to play from my old Hi8 days so I purchased the Digital 8. The camcorder allows you to freeze any frame in the camcorder's memory and transfer a set of about 20 640x480 frames to the PC via serial port. The 360x zoom is really an exaggeration; it has an excellent 20x optical zoom and the other 18x is handled digitally.
- The web pages were uploaded during our voyage using Internet cafes that allowed floppy disk access, wherever we could find them. Sometimes this was difficult; one place in Kobe had a pencil-scribbled note saying "floppy disks broken" and we couldn't communicate effectively enough with the cashier to find out how we could upload the pages. It seemed strange that all 30 of the computers had bad floppy drives. I tried sticking in the floppy disk anyway, but had 3 problems:
- It would only go in half way.
- There was no FTP software installed.
- The menus were in Japanese, so it was extremely hard to figure a way around problems 1 and 2! Other problems in other ports include keyboards with relocated letters and symbols, etc. Updating was a bit "iffy" or "chancy" at times.
- Would I recommend you try to build a site as you go around the world? Yes, with a few cautions.
- Advantages: It's a wonderful experience to receive informed messages from relatives, loved ones, and even strangers as you get into each port. They will send you encouraging words based on what you are really experiencing. It's exciting for them to see what is going on during the trip, and you arrive to people who don't need to be filled in completely on 14 weeks of adventure--try to imagine how long it would take to tell people what you want to say about 3.5 months of visits to 10 countries! Once they already know the basics, you can get to more interesting issues related to the trip.
- Disadvantages: You need to be patient and persistent, and you need to have the proper tools with you. Also, make sure you have an account that has enough space. The photos take a lot of room. I have 500 shots that each take an average of 20k. This ends up being too much for typical university accounts.
- You need to create the site on your laptop, and make sure all page references are relative. That is, do not include any http://www.etc.com in the href address. Just use a page reference such as page2.html. Take a course in HTML or, better yet, a tool to make it easy (such as Front Page 2000, Dreamweaver, etc.) before you go. Make your photos large enough to show detail, but small enough to load in the lifetimes of the site viewers.
- You need two floppy disks: one for WS_FTP (see below) and the other one for your new files (see the next step).
- Transfer only the new files at each port, to the designated floppy disk for your files, while you're on board. Then you can use that floppy disk to transfer the files to your computer. Unfortunately, only 5% of the computers in the cybercafes had FTP already installed to do the transfer. In one port I downloaded and installed WS_FTP (from www.ipswitch.com). But it took more than 20 minutes and I was required to register the software before downloading! Therefore, you simply must have some FTP tool on floppy disk; I used an older version of WS_FTP that fit onto a floppy, but I had to remove the help file to do so. All it took, at each Internet Cafe, were the following steps (once you create the reduced FTP floppy):
- Find a machine with a floppy drive (80% success rate here).
- Right-click on the desktop and create a folder named FTP or something like that.
- Insert the FTP floppy
- Double-click on "My Computer"
- Click on the Tools menu and click Folder Options.
- Click View find a box to click labeled "show hidden files and folders"
- Double-click the A drive
- Drag all files into the new FTP folder you created.
- Remove the FTP floppy and replace it with the floppy containing your new web content.
- Double-click the FTP folder to run FTP from the new folder.
- Upload your files. During the upload is a great time to check your e-mail. Just click on the START menu and start Netscape or Internet Explorer. Your machine will slow down a bit because FTP is still going on.
- Check to see if there are any errors. If you have a speaker, you'll hear the error blips furnished by WS_FTP. You can test your site, but the speed will be horrible in some ports. It might be better to scan the folders using WS_FTP and make sure they made it.
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