12th Dec 2018
Today I finished off my two pages on Greece, covering three nights spent in
Athens,
and a day trip to the island of
Aegina.
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2nd Dec 2018
I've been catching up with some of the older backlog lately, with new pages now online for
Samoa, including the islands of
Upolu and
Savaii.
I've also completed the pages for my subsequent destination,
Fiji, which included a trip around the
Mamanuca islands.
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27th February 2018
A little over a year after visiting, I have now published the pages on my Central America trip in
2016, taking in Costa Rica's capital
San Jose, the
Poas
volcano and surrounding nature reserves, and surf shanty town
Jacó on the Pacific Coast.
After Costa Rica I headed off for a few days to
Panama City,
with the obligatory trip through the
Panama Canal,
and rounded off with a visit to the tropical islands of
Bocas del Toro on the
Caribbean coast. Pura vida!
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9th October 2017
Exactly one year after returning from Turkmenistan, the pages are finally up!
Ashgabat,
Turkmenbashi and the
Karakum Desert
are all available for your enjoyment.
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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...
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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.
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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?
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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...
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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!
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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.
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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!
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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".
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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.
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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!
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23rd July 2010
I've just finished writing my new pages on
Norway,
including
Stavanger,
Tromsø
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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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...
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9th December 2009
The page on
Macau
is now complete!
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8th December 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!
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22nd November 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...
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14th October 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...
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27th August 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.
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7th April 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.
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12th March 2008
The page on
Paris
is done! But of course...
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11th March 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!
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10th July 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...
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3rd July 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!
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1st July 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...
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24th June 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...
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25th March 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!
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11th March 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...
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9th March 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...
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23rd February 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...
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10th November 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...
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9th October 2006
Just back from
Milan
a week ago, and have put up the nights out photos. Proper touristy stuff to follow!
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12th September 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.
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28th August 2006
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.
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16th July 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...
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30th June 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...!
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3rd May 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!
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7th January 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.
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8th December 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!
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22nd January 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.
|
9th October 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.
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21st September 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...
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12th September 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.
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28th August 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.
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18th July 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.
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3rd July 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.
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4th May 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.
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23rd February 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.
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5th December 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...
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13th November 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.
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3rd November 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!
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28th October 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.
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September 2003
No news this month I'm afraid. Broken computer and no internet make Ross a
dull boy.
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28th August 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.
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8th August 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.
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4th August 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...
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1st July 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!
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16th May 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!
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12th May 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...
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8th May 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.
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18th April 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.
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1st April 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.
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28th March 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.
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27th March 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.
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21st February 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.
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10th February 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.
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25th January 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!
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24th January 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...
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27th December 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.
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26th December 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...
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30th November 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.
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13th November 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?
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8th November 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.
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28th October 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.
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25th October 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.
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23rd October 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!
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21st October 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!
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30th September 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...
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19th August 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...
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10th August 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!
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4th August 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.
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3rd August 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!
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30th July 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.
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23rd July 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.
|
24th June 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.
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24th May 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.
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3rd May 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.
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2nd April 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!
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4th March 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.
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3rd March 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.
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21st February 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!
|
18th February 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.
|
3rd February 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.
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18th January 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!
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8th January 2002
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30th December 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.
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15th December 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!
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6th December 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.
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27th November 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...
|
21st November 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!
|
20th November 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!
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17th November 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...
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15th November 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..
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13th November 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.
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12th November 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.
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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.
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June 2001
Got bored with the idea, forgot about it for the time being.
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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.
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