News

18th October 2016 More international moves, resetting life and returning back to Aberdeen have spelled very few blog updates of late, but it certainly hasn't stopped me travelling! Since my last update I've clocked up another seven countries, covering the South Pacific, the Balkans and Central Asia. Now that I'm back in gear with the website and made some technical changes today, I plan to get on with the good stuff over the coming weeks...

25th October 2015 All of the Europe pages have at long last been re-written, cross linked and updated to the latest webpage template. Final batches to complete were Malta, France, England and Croatia. That completes the largest section of the website, now on to the same task for the remaining three continental areas...

19th October 2015 Yet more upgrades and rewrites to my existing pages these last few days, with Moscow and Saint Petersburg bringing my Russian pages up to date, and Oslo, Stavanger and Tromso doing much the same for my Norway set.

3rd October 2015 Continuing to plough through the backlog of new pages, I completed and uploaded a new one on Gibraltar today, barely two and a half years after my last visit. I count around twelve new pages remaining on my to-write list...

27th September 2015 Earlier this year, I had a long stopover in Iceland, my first proper visit since a family holiday back in 1991. I gleefully seized the opportunity to photograph the land during my two nights in Reykjavik, and the results can now be seen on my most recently refurbished page.

26th September 2015 After another brief hiatus, I have added a new page today on Poland, or more specifically its southern city and erstwhile capital, Krakow. This was followed shortly thereafter by new pages on my current home Alaska, and my home away from current home, Hawaii! My first new pages on the Americas in quite some years.

31st July 2015 I've been getting a bit carried away with my re-writes, and for my entire Spanish section I have reviewed and revised all of the photographs and sequences too. Take a look through the results at Barcelona, Granada, Madrid, Segovia, Toledo and Valencia all looking shiny and refreshed. At some point I guess this means I'll get round to writing the outstanding pages on much of Andalucia.

24th July 2015 More tweaking of page coding is afoot as I have set all of the Scotland pages to the corrected format with the latest size of photographs, plus I have added a few more pics to Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

11th April 2015 More pages re-coded today, but more significantly, I have revised the photos and improved the pages on Spain, Germany and the Vatican City following recent time spent revisiting each of those locations. Well, I say recent, but you know how that can mean any time within the last two years...

10th April 2015 For my first trick of 2015, I have added a few more photos to my page on Abu Dhabi, to include my visit to the Emirates National Auto Museum. I have also spent quite a lot of time fixing duff code on the home pages and About Me section, not that most people would notice, it's just my OCD acting up again...

25th September 2014 In tandem with the addition of my page on Lisbon following a sibling holiday late last year, I have also added a new country group by way of including Ukraine on my happy site! Our trip in the springtime took us to Kiev, along with a day trip exploring Chernobyl and the ghost city of Pripyat.

15th June 2014 The last parts of our October trip around south and central Europe has been written up, as can be confirmed at the pages on Austria, featuring the glorious city of Vienna, and Slovakia, being its quaint nearby capital city, Bratislava.

19th May 2014 Less than a year after visiting, I have written up that low-lying land of Lego, Denmark, and that nation of flatpack furniture wielding, Eurovision supergroup winners, Sweden! This follows our Scandinavian tour around the region last August. I have also been addressing a problem that just recently reared its ugly head - EXIF tags (which tell the computer which way round a photo was taken) are wreaking havoc in Windows 8, half my software recognises them, the other half don't. If any of my photos are sideways, please let me know!

12th May 2014 Last year was one of the busiest years of travel I've ever had, but consequently I've let my website languish again, not good! So this week I've got the first couple of new pages up for a while, with Florence and Pisa joining my Italian chapter, in addition to a rewrite of Rome. Watch this space for more to come soon! (Hopefully). I have also been busy rewriting most of my other Europe webpages, including a re-jig of the tables structure to sort out a couple of niggles in the page layouts.

16th December 2013 Asia had been calling again, so I have written up three new pages on The Philippines, including Manila, the island of Palawan and volcanic-disaster ravaged Angeles City.

12th November 2013 I've got some momentum going again with a brand new country added, Turkey no less. I have also added a couple more pages to my almost-complete UAE pages, with Hatta and Liwa added to the fold.

11th October 2013 Some website housekeeping is underway now, as I start to review every page and update with better interlinks, and remove some of the real rubbish I wrote years ago. I've also got round to adding a few more pictures to my pages on Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

17th August 2013 Not even two years after visiting, I've now completed the pages from my trip to Sri Lanka, including Colombo, Galle, Hikkaduwa, Kandy and beautiful Unawatuna. It was just a short five day trip over Eid in 2011, but a great experience and I will certainly be going back some day.

18th March 2013 More pages have recently been forthcoming, this time on Kathmandu, Lukla and Sagaramatha or Mount Everest as it is more commonly known, the result of my trekking trip in the Himalayas back in June 2011.

23rd December 2012 At long last I have released the first set of new pages on the United Arab Emirates! Building on my page about Dubai in 1988, I have added Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Al Ain, Dubai, Ras al Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm al Quwain for starters. At least three more are still to come however these have been on the cards for so long that I figured it was time just to release what I'd already completed. Enjoy!

23rd September 2012 Some more travels of mine around the Gulf have spawned two new webpages to add to my Middle East portfolio, this time Bahrain and Kuwait were the destinations of choice! Both a short hop from Dubai, while I'm out here in the region well it would be impolite not to go...

7th April 2012 Following an imposed break of around two and a half years, the Guestbook is back online! This had been a bit of a work in progress for a long time, although admittedly it hadn't been at the top of my to-do list for ages. I have made use of a script from the good people of Active-Scripts.net in order to get all the CGI jiggery-pokery working, and all seems to be in order. Check it out, and if you feel so inclined, leave a message! For the nostalgic amongst you, the Old Guestbook can also still be viewed, preserved forever in html stasis.

20th December 2011 Once again global events have had a profound effect on website traffic, with yesterday's beneficiary being my page on Panmunjom, North Korea, on account of the recent death of its dear leader, Kim Jong-il. The page was loaded 134 times, with 392 pages loaded in total across the site, registering 262 unique page views. This profoundly knocks the previous record of 192 into a cocked hat, achieved in April 2010. The biggest spike previously caused by global events was when my Iceland page was inundated with hits in April 2010 following the volcanic eruption and ensuing ash cloud which grounded European flights for a week. I wonder what will happen next?

13th November 2011 Celebrating the 10th anniversary of SnapHappyRoss! Hip hip, hooray! Yes, I launched this venerable old site ten years ago to this day, and I haven't aged a bit since then, at least according to my profile picture. I suppose I should really update it... Coupled with the site hitting six figure visitor numbers lately, it's been a significant few weeks. The current design has stood the test of time as I haven't felt the need to revamp the look of the site since 2002. Although it's still very much Web 1.0, so is my programming knowledge, but the visitors keep coming and there are no complaints about the layout or visual appeal. So looking ahead, as well as the ever-present backlog of pages to write (currently including Nepal, Sri Lanka and most of the UAE), I have a longer term initiative to review the entire content and rewrite where appropriate. Reading back to some of the pages I produced ten years ago, I do wonder what was going through my mind when I created such waffle. Which is not to say that I won't think the same thing after another ten years of operation. As part of this I intend to include more wording which is likely to improve visitor numbers, and to increase the cross-linking between pages for a more fully integrated webxperience. Oh, and some more stats: 209 pages and 4,123 photos, goodness knows how many words but it must be well over 120,000. It takes a very long time to paste all the text into MS Word for counting purposes...

25th October 2011 If SnapHappyRoss gave out prizes, then the lucky visitor who clocked up the 100,000th hit today would be laughing! Probably at the poor quality of the prize, I hear you say. Yes, after nearly ten years this site has finally made it into the realm of six figures of visitors. Hoorah! The 100,000th visitor was from Eagle, Idaho, USA, and having image searched in Google for "relative height", came up with a picture of the Standing Stones of Stenness on my Orkney page. At that rate of hits, one might say I've had an average of 10,000 hits per year. In fact, I hadn't indexed the site properly until 2007 at which point I had around 3500 hits, and my annual average is sitting more around the 30,000 mark at the moment. Here's to the next 100,000 visitors!

26th September 2011 Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled! With all these new English pages springing up, it was time for Scotland to fight back! So today I release my not-too-overdue page on Stirling, complete with castles, battles and Kings no less. That completes my European pages for now, and it's time to turn my attention towards the Middle East once more.

21st September 2011 Time now for more English updates, with the last of my current projected pages having been uploaded! Take a look at the baths in Bath, cathedrals and cheese in Somerset, piers and cliffs in Sussex and goths and freaks in Whitby. Although I don't have any more pages for England immediately on the cards, it's possible I'll be able to scrape together enough photos of Cumbria and the Lake District, plus very possibly Bristol.

8th August 2011 Yes, there's even more progress to report this month, and we're barely a week into it! I've put up my photos from last year's trips to Belgium and Luxembourg for all to enjoy. Beautiful countries both.

6th August 2011 I've finally started some of my new Middle East pages which have been on the cards for some time now. Qatar is now complete following my visit there relatively recently in April 2011, and I have three new pages on Lebanon all ready for you, including resurgent Beirut, ancient Byblos and pilgramage site Jounieh.

3rd July 2011 The Americas are once again complete! Following last year's trip to California, I have completed my rewrites of San Francisco and Los Angeles, including many of my new photos whilst still encompassing much of the decent old material. Just in time for Independence Day. The same also applies to my page on Toronto, not the sort of place one usually visits on a trip to California, but I had a long stopover, it was a sunny day, and well, you know how it goes...

20th June 2011 Here comes more from across the pond - additional pages from the United States covering San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz, Carmel and Pebble Beach. I think that's most of the San and Santas covered now...

13th June 2011 A couple of updated pages to unveil today, as I've added new and improved photographs to the pages on Edinburgh concerning the Scottish Parliament, and York concerning such varied topics as bullet trains and bile beans...

8th June 2011 The first of the new United States pages are now online - there are eight to do, but here are the first two; Big Sur and San Simeon, California, plus none other than Las Vegas, Nevada. Enjoy!

28th February 2011 Engerland! After a quarter century of visiting, living and working in England, it was finally time to diversify from my one not-altogether-comprehensive page on the neighbours to the south. Behold Hartlepool, Lincoln, London, Oxford, Stonehenge, Windsor and York are now all well represented, and there's yet more to come! At least another three English pages left for me to develop.

10th December 2010 My all-new page on Singapore is now online, after the usual lengthy delay. I've also taken the time lately to add some new pictures to my pages on Scotland, France and Wales. Enjoy!

5th December 2010 I've been going to Braemar and St Andrews for decades now, so at long last I have written some pages for them! I've also made a concerted effort lately to upgrade my page on Aberdeen, so that page has now had a complete overhaul and makes Aberdeen look really quite attractive, if I may say so myself. Lately I also finally came up with an easy way of producing buttons which light up when you mouse over them, without using Javascript or other such fancy means. Thanks to Webcredible.co.uk for its Trifecta button, based only on HTML and CSS, which was exactly what I needed. I adapted it slightly using a 80% transparent white image over the button background, to create the mouseover "shine".

13th November 2010 New pages on Croatia are now online! I'm picking up the pace now, as it's only about 5 months since visiting there. It's also now a lot easier to generate my webpages, as I've completed a spreadsheet template allowing me to type all the info in quickly, and use formulae and macros to do the hard work for me. The six new pages on Croatia are Dalmatia, Krka, Nin, Pag, Sibenik and Zadar. In other news, today marks the completion of the 9th year of operation of SnapHappyRoss.co.uk, and the time is just flying by. Hits today are sitting at 71,408, and there are 185 pages, with at least another 12 or so currently in the pipeline. Still no plans to change the format I developed in 2002, as it ain't broke, so I don't fix it.

6th November 2010 About time too - I've just finished the block of pages on Japan, a total of eight new witty scrolls covering such locations as the enigmatic Mount Fuji, careful-how-you-say-it Fukuoka, the Japanese Alps, pleasant Hiroshima, cultural Kyoto, historic Nara, lively Osaka, and of course bewildering Tokyo. This is about in line with my track record, as it's just over a year since I got back from the place. My list of pages still to write is only expanding in the interim!

23rd July 2010 I've just finished writing my new pages on Norway, including Stavanger, Tromsų and a re-write of Oslo which had been online since 2003. I've been going to Stavanger for years, so this was long overdue!

17th July 2010 China is finally complete! Nearly a year after leaving, I've finished my pages on that fascinating country, with the additions today of the Tianjin Economic Development Area (TEDA) and Tianjin. I now have more pages on China than any other country, which has prompted me to thinking that I need to get more pictures and pages online for Scotland and England.

29th May 2010 Although I still have a couple of China pages left to write, I'd been focused elsewhere and can now unveil South Korea! Just two destinations there so far, Seoul of course and also a short trip to Panmunjom.

14th May 2010 Five more pages on China uploaded! Such exotic locations as Datong, Guangzhou, Qingdao, Shanhaiguan and Xi'an can now be viewed at leisure. This nearly completes my China set of pages, there are only two left now, on Tianjin and TEDA.

19th April 2010 Hits have spiked up again recently, and it's mostly due to my new most popular page, Iceland. It's now getting 40% of my total hits, over 200 out of the last 500 hits (stretching back only to the evening of the 17th), thanks to the picture of a volcano I posted there nearly 9 years ago. I don't even know which volcano it is, although I'm certain it's not that particular one that's in vogue at the moment, but searching Google images for "volcanoes in Iceland" is scoring me a direct hit on page one. Awesome.

10th March 2010 A fanfare of trumpets for the 50,000th visitor! Eight years and four months since the founding of SnapHappyRoss.co.uk, the site has reached this giddy height of hits. The anonymous visitor, from Novi, Michigan, USA, had a look at my page on Ireland via a search for the most photographed Georgian door in Dublin, at around ten to midnight (UK time) last night. Around half of those hits have been clocked up since the beginning of 2009, but I implemented comprehensive site stats, switched to paid hosting (i.e. true SnapHappy URLs) and started submitting sitemaps to Google in early 2007, which was when things properly began to pick up. Here's a rundown of the total hits on the first day of each year:    1st Jan 2007 - 3,656 hits    1st Jan 2008 - 11,666 hits    1st Jan 2009 - 23,793 hits    1st Jan 2010 - 43,669 hits Of course, I don't actually truly know the number of hits, as prior to 2007 only people who visited the homepage would nudge the counter on, so the true number would be higher than that. However, as I had so few hits back in the early days, this difference pales into insignificance against the amount of traffic I'm now getting. Let's see how long it takes to clock up another 50,000! At the current rate we should get there on 25th August 2011, but the general trend is for a steady increase - all bets invited...

5th March 2010 New pages on China are now complete! Since moving back from my year living there over 6 months ago, I've figured there were about 14 new pages to complete. I'm doing this in two stages and the first set of seven are now online; Beijing, Guilin, Harbin, Shanghai, Yangshuo and Yunnan. I've also kept my original China page, slightly rewritten and now known as Beijing 1989. The next seven will be on their way soon, then I can move on to the outstanding pages on Korea, Japan, Singapore and Norway. It's a never ending task! Also fixed a small frame targeting error which was causing the main menu to pop up where the photos should be in each of the friends pages.

17th January 2010 Just under a year after visiting, I have now completed a page on Indonesia or more specifically, a page on the island of Bintan to which we took a day trip from Singapore. Another page that currently requires an update, too...

December 9th 2009 The page on Macau is now complete!

December 8th 2009 Well, at long last I have written up the outstanding pages which had been sitting with dummy text for over a year! Tunisia is now complete, with pages on Carthage, El Jem, the Sahara desert, Sfax, Sidi bou Said, Tataouine, Tozeur and Tunis all ready for viewing. Now it's time to get on with some of the places I've been to within the last year or so, but this time I'm vowing to write the whole page before uploading!

November 22nd 2009 Stone the crows! Not only are the pages on Gold Coast and Sydney finished, thereby completing the Australia section, but Bilad Sayt, Muscat and Nizwa have rounded off Oman, closely followed by Agra, Delhi, Goa, Jaipur and Mumbai which have done the same for India! Rapidly catching up here, but still a long way to go with an estimated 30 pages still to complete covering the likes of Tunisia, China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia and Singapore. In other minor news, the site passed its 8th birthday without fanfare on the 13th of this month. We're older than Facebook, YouTube and just a few months shy of Wikipedia. Maybe there's a new slogan in there somewhere...

October 14th 2009 Oh dear. There's really no excuse for the lack of progress over the last year; to add to the missing pages listed below, there are probably another 20-25 additional ones to write for all the new places I've been over the last year. I've got my work cut out for me. However, this post was prompted by the forthcoming demise of Geocities, with which this site was once closely associated, being hosted across 19 parallel accounts. Since I started paying for hosting (not with Geocities, I might add) the one remaining Geocities element has been the guest book, which will therefore be out of commission as of the 26th. This sets me a new challenge, as I've decided to code one for myself. Based on my track record, it should be ready some time in 2012...

August 27th 2008 True to form, the site is hopelessly out of date again, so it's time to get on with some page writing. But before that, I've just finished inserting "breadcrumb" links into each page, the type that show each level down to where you are, handy for navigating up a level or back home. I also swapped around the title of each page so you see the subject first and not the word "SnapHappyRoss.co.uk", which makes it easier to navigate multiple windows. This is all as a result of my reading those "how to improve your website" and "top ten annoying web designs" type pages. In other news, once the latest pages on Oman, Australia, India and Tunisia are completed, the site will exceed 3000 photos and 150 pages, all within a neat 115MB.

April 7th 2008 I'm beginning to get somewhere with the Indian page-writing challenge...the collection of non-touristy photos is now up at this link. Enjoy! Just got to write the actual pages now.

March 12th 2008 The page on Paris is done! But of course...

March 11th 2008 Hmm, well there's been a few things on the cards lately but once again, I'm a bit behind. Today I wrote the page on Orkney, having been there in August last year. I also have a page on Paris in progress (September last year) and five pages on India (December last year). I'd better get cracking!

July 10th 2007 Buoyed by my recent successes with getting the site fully up-to-date, I have added the photos from T in the Park 2007 just 2 days after being there! Thus proving that I can still be efficient, if told to be...

July 3rd 2007 The new Hong Kong and Kowloon pages have been written! That means the travel pages are entirely up to date! I think this is the first time since 2004, there's always always been something hanging around to be written, but not anymore!

July 1st 2007 That's the last remaining pages of my South East Asia trip written and uploaded, the outstanding ones were Hanoi, Siem Reap and Bangkok. I also put up the general silly snaps at this link. Pages on Malta, Valletta and Gozo also written today, to get the website almost fully up to date I only have a couple more pages to go! This is the most organised I've been with the site for years...

June 24th 2007 I've been away so much lately, and so busy with work, that I've let things slide... anyway, I have now written the Welsh page! Enjoy...

March 25th 2007 Finally, the page on the Netherlands has been written! About time too, given that I've been there four times since 1990 (many more stopovers too!) and it's taken me until now to get something decent up!

March 11th 2007 Wrote a page on Singapore! How did I manage that when I had no photos of the place and hadn't been since 1988? Good thing my folks were there not so long ago...

March 9th 2007 That's the Milan text finally written, suitably late in keeping with the rest of the site! However with one down it's been replaced with at least two more, as I was in Malta last week and there's a few things to do about that...! Went to Wales too so I finally have some pictures from there. Watch this space...

February 23rd 2007 Pages on Laos are now up! Go to Vientiane and Vang Vien for more details! I have a bit of time to work on the outstanding pages at the moment, because I'm stuck in fog on an oil platform...

November 10th 2006 That's the end of another epic adventure, this time in South East Asia, taking in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. I have at least 7 pages to write about it, so I'd better get cracking! Still got to write the Milan text as well...

October 9th 2006 Just back from Milan a week ago, and have put up the nights out photos. Proper touristy stuff to follow!

September 12th 2006 Made a small addition to the site today, a Travelogue page which just lists all of the trips I've made, year by year. I did it more as a personal exercise just out of interest, but I figured I should post the results anyway.

August 28th 2006 Finally, more than a year after going to the places, I have written the text for the pages on Buenos Aires, Iguazu, Rio de Janeiro, Ilha Grande, Paraguay, Colonia, Montevideo, Cu Chi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hoi An, Hue and the Mekong Delta. It's been a long time coming, but they are finally up! I am also going to make a couple of changes to the menu system, probably so that you don't have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to see more places, and I would like to put in one of those lines which shows you which folder level you are in at the top of each page, if I can figure out how.

July 16th 2006 A last minute purchase of tickets took me to T in the Park this year, take a look at the photographic results. I've put them online remarkably quickly, it usually takes me at least a year to do anything to the site these days! Computer broke last week, got a new power supply to sort it, but had that not happened I think I would have got the photos up even faster. Still have to write the text for a load of travel pages...

June 30th 2006 It's nearly ready! I've done very little since the last news posting, as I've been so busy with work and family visiting for the last couple of months, but everything is now online at SnapHappyRoss.co.uk as well it should be, although I still have to write the text for a load of the newer country pages. I've had some slight difficulties with the hosting company lately, as I was trying to swap the domain I was hosting under from VoyageRoss to SnapHappyRoss, but their customer service couldn't seem to quite fix it for me. So I cancelled the experimental VoyageRoss account and just started again under SnapHappyRoss, which seems to have worked very well so far. As long as I don't get charged for two hosting services when I am only using one...!

May 3rd 2006 I have been very, very busy with the site lately, to say the least. I have been incorporating SSI (Server Side Includes) into every page, which means that where menus are repeated from one page to the next, they are taken from a single seperate file and written into the page when it is loaded. This is very handy because if I want to change a menu, like I frequently do, then I only have to change one file not all of the files in a set (over 35 for the Friends pages). Further to this I have been writing pages on Buenos Aires, Iguazu, Montevideo, Colonia, Paraguay, Rio, Ilha Grande, Cu Chi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hoi An, Hue, and Mekong Delta for the travel section, plus another 13 in the Friends pages. It'll all be online within the next few weeks I hope. And further to that...I have uploaded all the new stuff on a paid-for hosting service, I thought it was about time I did away with the adverts, painfully tedious upload process and site split over 20 servers that was Geocities! I am now hosting with Streamline.net which is free for the first 3 months, and still very cheap after that!

January 7th 2006 Hooray! I have written some more pages, this time on Italy and the Vatican City. Only a year late. I still have lots more pages waiting to be written so I will see if I can get some more done shortly.

December 8th 2005 Well there have been a few changes this year to say the least...(although not to the website, I have been very lazy with that!) In 2005 I visited seven new countries and have as yet added none of them to the site, so now that I have internet in my flat again after a six month disconnection period, I should get cracking. I have graduated uni, my parents sold up and moved to Vietnam, my sister moved to Madrid and I now work for an oil company in Aberdeen. What with all these new countries I have been to lately, it is now at the stage where the menus need to be redesigned to accomodate extra buttons, and I've been to a new continent too so that needs to be factored in somewhere. I am also thinking of upgrading the photo quality of all the images (hunners of them) to be 512x384 or so, since there should be enough people using high-res monitors now to accomodate that!

January 22nd 2005 Just back from a mid-week break in Rome and the Vatican City, so I shall be working on a page or two on that shortly, especially now that the exams are over and it's the first couple of lazy weeks of the new semester.

October 9th 2004 Uploaded some of the photos of our happy gang on the Baltic tour 2004 today, which I had been meaning to do for ages - it is called Russian Odyssey. It has not been fully linked in to the rest of the site yet, I will get round to that sometime soon, but for the moment it can be accessed directly from the Main Menu page.

September 21st 2004 Completed the page on the North Sea today, it has been fully linked in to the rest of the site. I have also been collecting some new photos for my Aerial and Photography pages, which are in dire need of updating. More to come soon...

September 12th 2004 Hooray! I have finally finished the five pages from our Baltic Tour 2004: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Finland, Latvia and Estonia have all been uploaded and are fully linked in to the site. Next on the agenda is a page on the North Sea, following my recent visits to some oil rigs.

August 28th 2004 The page on Moscow has been completed, after a bit of a delay due to a browser hijack on my computer at home which was making it impossible to write webpages.

July 18th 2004 Have finished writing two of the five new pages which I have lined up at the moment, the ones for Estonia and Finland. They are not yet fully linked into the site however, but can be accessed from the destinations page. Still to come are Lativa, Moscow and St Petersburg.

July 3rd 2004 Created a new page listing all of the destinations I have been to since my inception, complete with a pretty list of all the relevant flags. Have just come back from holiday around Russia and the Baltic, so I will be adding four more pages to the European section in due course.

May 4th 2004 Following my recent trip to Arizona and California, I have written a page on Arizona and also one on Germany as I had a quick stopover there on the way back! I also put up some photos of the Arizona folks at this link, which at the moment is an auto generated page. I may incorporate it properly into the site at a later date when I have more time.

February 23rd 2004 I've not done anything here for ages! Been very busy with uni work and exams etc, but I also haven't been to anymore interesting places, nor found anymore photos to add nor been on any big nights out since the last post! I've not even updated the copyright marks (I'm beginning to question the point in doing this?) What I did today though was to modify my pages on Ireland and Israel after receiving a note that my Irish page misrepresented the North, something which I had not noticed before. I found a similar problem with the Israel page and updated it accordingly.

December 5th 2003 Ah ha! Some updates done today, not overly overdue as seems to be usual these days either! New pages on the my recent trip to Shetland, the Last Venture Dinner and Ken's 21st. Also thinking about splitting the nights out sections off from the main site, as it's getting far too difficult to organise these days as a single unit...

November 13th 2003 Happy birthday to my website! Two years old today, and I'm still not scunnered with it. I am once again hatching some plans for a rearrangement of the site, incorporating the domains I bought earlier this year. Time for some stats: The hit counter seems to have a habit of "forgetting" hits more than 18 months old, which is annoying, but it is fairly accurate at about 2000 hits, which is 1000 a year and 3 a day. Not bad, says I. With the recent additional pages, and not including any HTML code, there are a little over 37,000 words in the site. The most words on one page (aside from this one and the guestbook) are for New York, (1300) followed by San Francisco and Valencia. The most hits for one page as far as I know are for Valencia, with more than 100 hits a week, over 3500 since October 2002 when I wrote it. Those hits are from people on search engines mostly, which bypasses the index page. The total number of pages is now 69, total photos is 1357 and the space occupied by the complete site is 37.5 megabytes.

November 3rd 2003 Phew, it's been a tough couple of days. As well as having plenty of uni work to be getting on with, I have made about the most changes to the site since August last year when I put in the new design. I've finally integrated the New York page into the site design, added new pages on Cuba and Norway, and added some photos to the Aerial, Dubai, Edinburgh, France, Glasgow, Ireland, Jordan, Scotland and Spain pages. Furthermore, I added more CSS to every single travel page which I had been meaning to do since May, and I rotated the Monacan flag so that it was no longer the Polish one. Wow I've been busy! And so the site nears some form of completion, eventually, but I fear that will never be for of the 22 countries I have visited as of today, I have very few pictures of the two remaining to be included in the site (Singapore and Holland), so I don't know how I will be able to add them!

October 28th 2003 I've figured out today why I have been getting loads of "Cannot deliver mail" and "Out of Office Autoreply" messages in my email inbox lately. Some despicable little toad has hijacked my website address to spam others, and when they bounce they are returned to the forged email address whatever@snaphappyross.co.uk, so I get the spam too! The fools! The eejits! They are damaging the good name of my website. I spit on their spam, and scoff at their offers of trash.

September 2003 No news this month I'm afraid. Broken computer and no internet make Ross a dull boy.

August 28th 2003 Created the page on New York City which I had been thinking about for more than a year now, as I finally got my hands on a scanner so I could scan the less than good quality pictures I have from there. Haven't yet arranged the rest of the site to accomodate the new page yet but I am having some computer difficulties just now. Also, I really must get round to turning the flag for Monaco over! I recently discovered that it is identical to the Polish flag when upside down. Interestingly, if you flip the Irish flag around you get the flag of the Ivory Coast.

August 8th 2003 Finished and uploaded the new page on Monaco today. I will have to make some changes to it as the flag is in fact upside down, which the Monacans (or is it Monacons?) would surely take offence to. However I have a couple of computer probs right now so I won't be able to do it for a few days.

August 4th 2003 Photos arranged and the necessary pages rewritten for Inglis' 21st birthday night out in Aberdeen, one which will surely go down in history. I actually didn't upload the photos until tomorrow, which makes this message early for a change! Sort of...

July 1st 2003 Well that took a long time for anything to get done! Today I uploaded photos from Maura's 22nd birthday celebration, and also a whole bunch of random photos from the last couple of months which I decided to christen La Primavera. I have been very busy with exams for the last month and now have a while until my next one so I have spent the time wisely doing websitey things!

May 16th 2003 Reluctantly, I have finally uploaded pictures from the joint birthday celebrations of Nina and myself at the end of April, I have called the page Ross's 21st. Amongst the photos were some of the worst ones that have ever been taken of me, needless to say I didn't upload them all!

May 12th 2003 Some more CSS work performed today, rearranged the guestbook which took a long time and uploaded the new style sheet and affected pages. Have also realised that my links page is probably quite out of date, especially the Music/Video sites as I haven't checked any of them since August...

May 8th 2003 Did plenty of entirely unnoticeable work this evening, implementing fully the CSS tags I made up last August so that the whole site is now under its potent influence as opposed to just a few paragraphs here and there. This means a couple of things, firstly that badly set browsers will no longer twist and contort my carefully thought out pages with wrong text sizes, and secondly that I can now change the text and link appearance at a whim by just the merest alteration of one file.

April 18th 2003 The new page on Morocco was installed in SnapHappyRoss, and there was rejoicing. A public holiday was declared and the Mayor of the town decided to lower taxes. People danced in the street (which had bunting) and even Manson Grant and the Dynamos were called in as minstrels. All in all a good day was had (by all). Just trying a different slant at my news bulletins.

April 1st 2003 Finally updated my page on Valencia. I have been collecting photos for months but just never got around to posting them, same old story. Working now on the England page, soon to be updated.

March 28th 2003 Loadsa work been done today! First time in more than a month as well, I've been busy with uni work. Three new Nights Out pages have been created, Doug's 21st, Las Fallas and some random Spanish Nights are all now online. Rearranged the Friends pages to accomodate these new ones. Also added in new sections on aerial photography and some of my favourite photos of all time. Both these sections will be added to when I go back to Britain and dig around in the stuff I didn't bring to Spain with me.

March 27th 2003 Bought a new domain today, www.rosswattie.co.uk which I had been meaning to buy for a while before anyone else did, even though I'm not aware of anyone else in the world who shares my name...! Haven't got a clue what to do with it yet though, so at the moment it just links to the title page of this site.

February 21st 2003 My new page on Andorra is now online, please click the link to have a look! Still working on perhaps a Catalunya page, if I can get enough decent photos together. Also added more links to this news page to make things more accessible.

February 10th 2003 Now that classes are back again and exam time is over, I have a little bit more time to work on the website, at least without feeling guilty for not revising. Went to Andorra last weekend and a couple of places in Catalunya and the Costa Blanca so there will perhaps be another page or two on the way soon! Also modified the Main Menu page so that it is easier to update, the onscreen difference however is negligible.

January 25th 2003 New Year pictures from Edinburgh are now online! Had to censor one of them though, don't want to get done for publishing indecent material! Go to this link to see them in all their glory!

January 24th 2003 Did something today that I originally planned to do in early April - upload the pictures from Strathclyde's Loch Eil 2002 trip. All the photos were ready, I just had to modify one of the Friends pages as a template and we would have been off, but I just never got round to it - until today that is! I have not integrated it with the rest of the site, not decided if I will or not yet, but in the meantime they can be accessed through this link. Changed most of the page copyright dates as well, when I really had nothing else to do...

December 27th 2002 Loadsa work been done today on the site! I have either added or swapped around some pictures on the pages for Scotland, England, Iceland, Dallas and Aberdeen. Also, I have created an all-new page on Granada which is online too! However, the New York page has a way to go, the picture quality is not good so I need to get my hands on a scanner to capture the images properly. The Valencia page will be updated some time soon as it is not very good right now and I have many good photos to add to it. The lamest page award now goes to Hong Kong, as Iceland has been upgraded to have more than two photos on it.

December 26th 2002 After a wee while of not doing any website related work I decided to get back into it again...it's that or do some studying. So I have been arranging things with a view to creating a page on Granada (recently visited) and New York (not so recently visited!) In other news, December 2002 has been the second worst month of hits to date...

November 30th 2002 No! No! No! Well it had to happen sometime I suppose...yesterday was the first day in a long time that the site has not had a single hit. October 19th was the last zero scoring day, and since then there has been at least one, if not 25 visitors per day to my little space on the web. Never mind. November 2002 has ranked as the third best month for hits so far.

November 13th 2002 Hooray! It's been one year to the day since I unleashed this website on the world...you can read the story so far in all the news bulletins underneath...I think it's come quite a long way! Site hits currently rank at 1083 as displayed on the opening page, but the true number of views is higher, at 1371. This is due to the change in frame setup of the site on August 10th 2002, the title page was originally index1.html which was framed by index.html and each page had a different number of hits. When index1.html was removed, the counter would have jumped 300 places unless it had been adjusted to fit in with the previous value. The highest ranking month so far has been August 2002 with 217, the lowest July 2002 with a pathetic 44. I personally avoid visiting the home page myself as I don't want to push the counter on and give a (more) innacurate representation of how many visitors I have had. This is related to why I inserted a menu page (see below under October 25th 2002). There are currently 50 pages making up the site, and a number in the region of 800 photographs including thumbnails. I can't say for sure as I don't have the means at my disposal to count them all accurately and quickly, but I will find out soon! So anyway, I wonder where the site will go in future...I know that I will probably rename it at some stage when my lease expires next summer...any suggestions?

November 8th 2002 Finally uploaded photos from Matt's 21st Birthday, some of which took place at the same pub as Devon's. Also added a few more links which I have found myself using lately. I am wondering whether or not I should start simply replacing older photo sets from last year or not as soon enough I will run out of bandwidth.

October 28th 2002 Photo's from Devon's Birthday are now online, and a couple of minor changes have been made to the main menu and other little things.

October 25th 2002 Well what began as just writing a few more pages blossomed into a structural rearrangement involving the modification and uploading of nearly every single page in the site. I've been very busy the last couple of days creating a site map or main menu page from which you can access all parts of the site without having to go back through the index page. This should give a more accurate representation of how many people have visited as opposed to how many times the home page (with the counter) has been opened, often by the same person repeatedly. The pages on all the Spanish places mentioned on previous days are all complete and online, so the next project is to upload the photos from Devon's 21st birthday.

October 23rd 2002 Began to create the new pages in the Spanish section, don't know how long it will take but should easily be completed within a month! Also spotted the same button error at the bottom of the San Francisco page as the Friends pages, which shall be corrected!

October 21st 2002 I now have enough photos of Madrid, Barcelona, Toledo and Segovia to make pages on these cities, but I still need to take some more of Valencia, which will be done hopefully in the next few weeks. In the meantime I have figured out how I will integrate the new Spain section within the rest of the pages, it will be a section within a section. You'll see!

September 30th 2002 The last major site change was intended to set me up for a good while without having to perform much maintenance and simply to add in sections. It seems to be working okay so far, I have not altered any of the structure recently, but I have put in redirect pages where previously there were separate index pages which didn't work properly. I am in Spain now on exchange so I will be updating the site through Uni computers which will make it a bit more challenging, but you can expect some more Spanish pages in the near future. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to integrate them with the rest of the site though...

August 19th 2002 A couple of minor glitches have come to light, some of the guestbook had been incorrectly rewritten...I was putting words into other people's mouths...but it was cleverly spotted by a user and I fixed it. Also noticed today that there was a small error in all the friends pages causing some buttons to appear incorrectly, so that was another time consuming task to attend to. On a lighter note, this is the highest ranking month of hits so far, just beating November 2001 when the website began! We'll see if the trend is for an increase...

August 10th 2002 It's now been at the back of my mind for so long that I just want the site on line! Decided to leave out the history page for now and uploaded the files to their respective servers. Let's roll! After testing I found a couple of frame target problems and some links which hadn't been correctly updated but nothing that didn't take too long to fix. The results in Netscape are less than satisfactory, but that's just what I've come to expect from their sub standard browser. Overall however, I am very pleased with the new look and hope it will be popular with visitors!

August 4th 2002 Spent ages checking the party page pictures for size errors and duplicates (of which there were many!) and reduced the quality of the photos for faster loading up time. Also added a section for the photos of Stephen's birthday in March. Considering not bothering with the in house guestbook and counter yet, I want to get the new site up as soon as I can.

August 3rd 2002 Alrighty! Things are going very well, all the pages have been proof read and corrected and the links are updated. Designed a new system for viewing the party pages, it's the best yet and seems to work without any hitches. Not long until the whole thing is replaced!

July 30th 2002 There is progress being made here...all the travel pages and the local friends pages have been converted to the new format (all offline, you won't see them here yet!) So the next stage is to redesign the party pages and check everything for spelling mistakes and stupid things I have said. I will also be reviewing the links page and creating a new section on history of the design of this site (just to fill up a space in the buttons!) I am also considering writing the guestbook myself as the geocities one could do with some improvement.

July 23rd 2002 Do not let the absence of any work deceive you, I have been tearing my hair out trying to decide how this website design will come to evolve. I think I have come to a solution, in terms of graphics and layout, so now what I need to do is translate all 40 or so pages into the new format. It will probably not be much fun but it should be worth it in the end! Been thinking about adding a complete section on Stephen's 20th at some stage, but probably not until the new design is complete.

June 24th 2002 It seems that I only make any major updates once a month to my website these days, not that anyone's complaining though! Anyway, I have added 20 more uni mates photos and another 5 of my compadres back home. The new site design is progressing slowly, I really have no idea how long it will take as it is all developing just as I go along.

May 24th 2002 Hooray!!! One of my pictures is being published!!! In a book!!! Cool!!! The book is a quality collection of travel photographs from Picture.com and will be brought out by the end of the year. The photo is of Downtown Los Angeles and is in my Los Angeles page, it can also be seen on Picture.com at this link.

May 3rd 2002 I've been slacking off with maintaining the site this last month, so I added pictures from my recent trip to Ireland, and a few more of Aberdeen. I also figured out a way of reducing the size (KB) of all the photos by about two thirds, thereby making load time for each page at least twice as fast. You should notice a considerable difference especially on a dial-up. I am beginning to hatch plans for a complete reworking of the styles and frames, in short - a new website design.

April 2nd 2002 Got round to doing something more to the site after being lazy for a month, slightly redesigned all the buttons to save loading up time. It took all morning to do and the difference is barely noticeable. C'est la vie. Did some more work this afternoon, added some more photos to Edinburgh, Glasgow and created a new page for Aberdeen, something I should have done a long time ago!

March 4th 2002 I was bored revising, so I figured this one out - the site now contains 678 photos, including thumbnails, 61 GIF images (flags, buttons etc) and 12,729 words not including HTML script.

March 3rd 2002 At long last the pictures from the now legendary Spanish Party of late 2001 are online. I was inspired into doing this by having another party last night, so I put those pictures up too. I'm very tired now, and I still can't use our bathroom after the atrocities that were committed therein just a few hours ago this morning. I'm going to bed.

February 21st 2002 Today it finally hit me - why the site wasn't working with Netscape. Bah. Every page I had made (except the Party and New year ones) was based on a template I created in October which had the slashes back instead of forward. IE doesn't worry about this tiny error but Netscape insists that everything must be perfect before it feels like co-operating! I now hate it even more. I only had to change the code for 328 images!!! Did even more updating later on tonight, added more pictures to the About Me section, checked and updated my Links page, cleaned out the rubbish from the Geocities servers and added a page on Syria! My goodness, I don't know what's come over me!

February 18th 2002 Hooray! I finally added the pictures that had been sitting on the back burner for quite some time - take a look at Friends section. Must get round to doing some other additions too.

February 3rd 2002 The Egypt page is complete and online, but Syria and Cuba pages are a long way behind! Also changed the colour of the links as they weren't showing up properly against the blue background on badly set monitors. Had problems with the main index pages too - for some reason they had been taken off line along with a few graphics. Had to upload new ones.

January 18th 2002 Decided to post some more pictures of Houston, Israel and Pinang Island. Began to create all-new pages on Egypt, Syria and Cuba - these should be up in a couple of weeks. Spent all afternoon coming up with a new way of looking at my pictures from various parties, take a look in Friends and see what you think!

January 8th 2002 Added a few more pictures to England, Dubai and Dallas.

December 30th 2001 Google has decided to list me now, quite comprehensively in fact. The site is also now listed on a number of travel guide sites so I'm very happy about that. In other news, I have added a couple more sections under "friends", and hope to add more after new year.

December 15th 2001 Hooray! I have finally had some success with registering this site to the search engines. I am now listed on Welsh Net search, although how they found me I don't know - must be some Altavista datasharing or something. Well, hopefully I'll be getting some visitors from Wales, boyo!

December 6th 2001 This probably explains why I have been getting messages saying that the pictures don't work for some people - I used the site with Netscape today for the first time, and it didn't work properly. For some reason Netscape can't interpret the html script as well as Internet Explorer, and doesn't show the pictures. It's not a problem for me, I don't like Netscape, I don't use it, and neither should you.

November 27th 2001 Uploaded a few more links, this time to various Scouting websites that I know of! Also figured out how to make links change colour when you point the mouse at them. My work here is done...

November 21st 2001 Well I finally changed the opening picture of me - people seemed to think it was "too scary" or something like that. Hopefully this one will be better for you, at least it isn't one I took myself!

November 20th 2001 I put in proper meta tags to UKReg today, and registered with Altavista, Yahoo, Lycos and Google. It takes about 6 weeks for an engine to fully register your site (drag) but once it does it should generate more traffic!

November 17th 2001 I suppose it was naive of me to think that the feedback I get for this website would all be positive, but there are plenty of people out there no doubt that would leave derogatory and obscene comments in my guestbook. Still, while these people aren't man enough to even admit who they are, they can't be named and shamed and will continue to skulk in cyberspace. Quite sad really...

November 15th 2001 Things going well with new servers, the site hasn't locked up since (I think) so I'll leave it as it is. For reference, the site currently contains 208 photos (not including thumbnails) and around 12000 words not including script..

November 13th 2001 First day of running, quite a few people already checked it out! Unfortunately, this causes the site to lock up because Geocities has pathetic bandwidth for freeloaders like me. Decided to split it over six different servers, therefore acquiring six times the data transfer. Hurrah! Also added this news section.

November 12th 2001 At last, I added the finishing touches to the site. Uploaded the remaining files, (most had already been uploaded and tested) and spread the word to all 120 people or so on my mailing list.

October 2001 Chop! chop! busy! busy! work! work! bang! bang! I spent a huge amount of time working on this, much more than expected, and I took more photos of Scotland. To cap it all, my computer packed in, I couldn't get it fixed for two weeks until I bought a new hard drive from Priceless Computing and reinstalled windows from scratch. Ho hum.

September 2001 Got back home to Britain, continued with site design and stuff.

August 2001 Bought me a brand spanking new digital camera from Zero Delivery.com and started taking pictures like a lunatic. I told all my workmates at Barley's Brew Pub in Columbus, Ohio, that I would send them some of the hundreds of photos I had taken, until one clever person suggested I should put them on a website! Now I had a purpose, I thought of a name, bought it, and began making a site on my room mate Brittany's computer.

June 2001 Got bored with the idea, forgot about it for the time being.

May 2001 Decided to make a website. Don't know what on yet, but was prompted when my Dad said "why don't you have a website, boy?" And so I began. I found an e-book about html, followed the first few exercises and produced something very rough with pictures of schoolfriends.

Copyright © Ross Wattie 2001-2016