OK, this page isn't going to have the fan-base of, say, Kathy's presentation on Early Retirement. But a couple of people have asked, so I thought I'd take a stab of explaining the gyrations we go through, in order to keep blessley.net up to date when we travel.

Some of the "tools of the trade" are on another page under the Antarctica cruise; this page is more about the process.

Apologies in advance: we'll try to keep the technical jargon down -- but hey, it's a technology article -- it's unavoidable.

Getting (from, say, Antarctica) to our website

Our site is hosted by an internet provider ("ISP") called ICDsoft. Their systems reside in California and Hong Kong (you get your choice when you sign up). They have great connectivity, which is to say no matter where you roam, if you can get to "the" internet, you can reach their site efficiently. But, as they say, "getting there is half the fun". The other half of the "fun" is getting material from our laptops (which we usually travel with) to the computer that we use to do the updates. These are seldom our computers, and their owners (Internet cafes, for example) have a vested interest in not letting us connect our computers -- or storage -- to theirs. A simpler problem, but not as trivial as you might think, is how Kathy and I share information -- text for the web, photos, etc -- between our computers. More on this later.

Software

There isn't that much, really, to a website. Sure, go to CNN.COM and you'll see scads of eye-catching graphics (too many, for my taste) -- but at the end of the day, it's all just a combination of text ("abcedfg") and graphics (photos, drawings...) and a few "commands" that tell your internet browser (AOL; Internet Explorer...) how to display a page on your particular computer. If you do it right, you see the same format as we right -- except it may be reformatted to fit a smaller or larger screen.

To put the text and graphics together, and to smooth out the wrinkles that come from a world of diversity of computers, we use Dreamweaver 2004 software, from Macromedia (now owned by Adobe -- the Acrobat Reader people). Dreamweaver is considered "best in class", but there are still a few things it doesn't do well. An example is thumbnails: a thumbnail is a small image (photo, usually) that stands in for a larger one. This speeds up how quickly a page displays ("page load time") and lets you see the images you want to, and skip by those you don't, that you may continue to absorb the witty repartee you are reading at this very instant. Yeah.

We take a lot of digital photos. Many of them don't come out properly (somebody walks in front of the camera at just the wrong moment; the camera focuses on something that wasn't actually the subject you had in mind), but that still leaves 100-200 hundred "keepers" every day or so. No, we're not that brilliant at photography, we just have low standards. ("If you're easily pleased, you're please more often")

The photos need to be cataloged somehow or we'd never be able to find them again (Scott's photo collection alone takes up about 15GB of space (that's the equivalent storage of about 15,360,000,000 typed characters). For this we use software called "ACDsee". We have no idea where we first bought this software, or why, but we continue to use it. Like all programs, it has high and low points, but it's the best we've found for our needs.

Putting files on a website ("publishing") isn't quite as easy as say, sending an email. Dreamweaver has the capability to directly publish files, and it knows that, say, File X has graphic Y on it, that if you upload ("put") File X, it should do Y too. Unfortunately, since we can't connect always connect our computers to the internet directly, we need another way. Enter the dongle.

The term "dongle" goes back a long time (and the people who care, probably already know, and vice-versa) but what it refers to these days, are little memory chips that behave like a teeny disk drive. In fact, they're often called "thumb drives" because they're about the size of a thumb. You plug it into your computer "USB" port, and poof! you have another disk drive letter (Windows) or equivalent (Macintosh). You can transfer files to and from it just as if it were a CD or a diskette. You remember diskettes, right?

The dongle is hardware, so we don't speak of it for another minute or two. But it facilitates getting files (like web pages...) between the computer on which they're written, and the one that's used to put them on the web site.

Special purpose software

Because we can't directly connect our computers to the ship's network (we could, but they wouldn't be happy about it), we have a couple of challenges. First, synchronizing email between the laptops (we use Microsoft Outlook). We have a program called "Dmailer" for this. The concept is brilliant. The implementation... could be better.

Getting a large number of files from the laptop to the internet requires software that can compare the files to potentially upload, with the existing ones. It does this by comparing the dates, then it "asks" what you'd like to do with the particular scenario ("NewPhoto.jpg" is news than the existing file. Want to overwrite it?". We have a free program called "FileZilla" that resides on the dongle and does this for us.

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