This site is a new kind of effort for me. Previously, I've used free "groups" facilities at sites like Yahoo or MSN. They are easy enough to use but limiting in what you can do with them. Also, I often update my stuff on the road via the laptop using my cell phone as a low-speed modem. Filling in web-page forms to post the site is excruciatingly slow. It would be much faster to upload materials via FTP. Finally, there are the matters of storage space limitations and weird URL s you have to use with the "group" sites. So, I decided to "roll my own".

My objectives:

• Inexpensive
• Easy to maintain
• Fast response
• Reasonably attractive

My most recent change to this web site is to add advertising. I was reluctant at first but finally decided to do so if only to recover the cost for hosting the site (see below). I chose to use the "for content" version of Google's AdSense program. It is fairly easy to set up, is relatively unobtrusive and the ads seem to relate to page content resonably well.

I chose to purchase a host site and domain name. I did that with IX Web Hosting. IX has a reputation for excellent service, fast server response times, free domain registration and reasonable cost (about $4.00/mo). The account was absurdly easy to set up and get going. I chose their "Economy Plan", now called "Expert", with a two-year contract. The account included a management interface, tons of e-mail addresses, web mail, 10 GB storage, site usage statistics, etc. And their help desk seems responsive. My only ticket, so far, was for help with the properties of a mailing list and they actually went in and, within 24 hours, made the changes to make it operate the way I described.

I decided to use IX Hosting's recommended FTP client, Smart FTP. It is free to non-commercial users. It works great. I can point to single files or identify complex sets of files and/or whole sets of subdirectories using simple drag and drop and have them loaded to the site automatically.

I've done a tiny bit of hand coded HTML but wanted something better. I settled on Nvu, an open-source freeware package. The development effort is mainly directed toward the Linux community but is available for Windows PCs which is where I live. There are clearly some limitations, like it doesn't know about SSI, and the code is slightly buggy but it is good enough to easily code pages like this one which fills most of my needs.

I have pretty much content to post and maintain and I need methods to keep things easy to manage. The first requirement is to keep the navigation separated from individual pages so that I don't have to add a link to every page on the site whenever I add a new page to the site. I started out using frames for that purpose. It was easy to do but meant that it was difficult to provide a link to a specific page. I ended up converting to the use of server side includes (SSI). I can use SSI to cause the server to insert separately maintained snippets of html code for the navigation. So, as with the frames method, I maintain one snippet of HTML that is used for the top level navigation on every page on the site in the upper left corner of each page. Then, for the section level navigation, I have an HTML snippet that appears below the main navigation on every page of that section. One downside to using SSI is that Nvu doesn't know about it so I have to do some manual coding for each page.

Another minor down-side to using SSI is that I can't simply use my web browser to check the appearance and function of a page because browsers don't know about SSI ... the web server does.  That means I have to run a web server program on my PC to check the final product.  Fortunately, Apache, the world's number one web server program is available for free in a form that runs on an ordinary PC.  The Apache Software Foundation serves it from their web site at www.apache.org along with all the instructions you need to get it up and running on your PC.

The second requirement is to use some kind of template system to keep the look and feel of the site consistent. Toward that end I created a simple template using MS WordPad as the editor. I created it in RFT form so I can have some color formatting for visual cues. Now, I write in a WordPad .txt file, paste that into Nvu to insert photos and do the text formatting and save it as .html. Finally, I cut the formatted text from the html file and paste it into my RFT template and save as a text file with an extension of .shtml so the web server will recognize that it uses SSI. This may all sound complicated but it's really pretty easy to do. On the plus side, I haven't had to spend a penny on tools.

I got into digital photography relatively early. Small is good as far as I'm concerned and I've been using Canon's Digital Elph series ... currently the PowerShot S410 since my first one was stolen. While not perfect it does what I need and is almost always with me.

For graphics, I'm a long-time user of Jasc Software's Paint Shop Pro. (The product has apparently been taken over by Corel.) I'm currently using ver 7.04. The package is inexpensive and it does all I need and more. I doubt I'll ever become really comfortable with the use of layers but I just don't use what I don't need.

Setting up a rational system of folders on the site helps immensely to manage my files. There is a folder for each sub-section of the site ... Bahamas Bound, Tin Tent Tour, etc and each of those has it's own "images" folder. The navigation code snippet for the top left corner is stored in the top level folder along with the main index.html that is a simple redirector to the index.shmtl page of the "home" section. Every section folder contains its own index.shtml page, the navigation code snippet and all the body pages for that section. Each section folder also contains an "images" folder for all the graphics that are used in that section. I've tried very hard to not have multiple instances of any code or images. All files are named in ways that make their purpose/content easy to understand.

Finally, I'm on my own for the "reasonably attractive" part. I certainly have no special artistic design skills. I just hope that what I've done provides a good reading experience for you!

I'll certainly entertain your suggestions for tools and techniques!

Bill Stine