Lemme know your honest opinions as I want to make this blog user friendly. BTW I don't have much in the way of content yet but I'm getting there. http://charliesmotochronicles.blogspot.com/ Thanks
Maaan, kudos to you to try and get an endless number of rides somehow organized and "in line". Decades of rides big and small, who was along for which ride, which bike/ jacket/ luggage did he/her use an such + such a trip, when did we go to xxx, there was that river crossing...but where?? And there's 1000's of pics around... all over the bloody place. Know what you mean...and the "chronicle" bit of the blog indicates the idea of getting some order into things...but Holy Crap, what a job! In my case, I went with a chronological "listing", adding the year to the trip-titles, then checking back on the picture-dates to stack the listings as per months etc. Each ride-listing has a few pics (as a visual trigger for myself and those who were along at the time...plus it's nice for a visitor to see what's in store) and a short wrap up to make it easier to identify....and a link to the full story. This way allows myself and mates to check back and find rides that we've participated in quickly and/ or by some additional hook like :that must've been August, that was 2 weeks before my birthday"....or...."that ride was the first after I bought the DRZ in February '09"...etc. I find myself using it constantly/ daily as a resource to check back on ride details, pics, bikes, places, folks and a myriad of other things. My friends and riding-mates are doing the same, the whole thing being searchable by key words/ names/ locations/post-dates etc as well. Took me about 4 months all up to get the listings done....nowadays I just occasionally update/ add to it with a few rides of the last few weeks at a time...which takes me about 30mins to do the job and about 2 hrs of reading the ride-reports again and gawk at the pics I'm a sucker for good yarns and photos. Once you've done it....it becomes invaluable in no time flat!! Apart from being able to browse the listings, pics and blurbs on a leisurely night and getting stuck reading up on some half-forgotten ride from 15 years ago. Good luck...just don't forget to add some easy + logical structure that makes it easy for you (and friends, family, riding buddies etc) to find specific stuff on the site/ blog. Flashy looking stuff gets frustrating quickly... if one can't find it. And try to pick a site/ format/layout etc to work with that is unlikely to disappear soon or gets merged with other stuff/ a server getting taken over...or superseded software-wise to a point where it's non-transferable into other formats etc. because you don't want to do this a second time around.
Good advice all around Glitch. Spiderman, I 've got at least 40 more rides that will be posted eventually. As Glitch says, it's hard to sort out. Winter is nearly upon us so I needed a diversionary project.
Hey Charlie, I took a peek with Apple/Safari and on an Android smart phone. Good work, works well on both. As far as content layout etc, you'll fine tune as you go. While the background image is beautiful, it is quite busy and detracts from the reading and navigation. (It makes my eyes go crossed) For me I used a color picker to help build sites. There are many free website color compatibility pickers online. http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/scripts/color-schemer/color-schemer.html
Thanks Dave, I hadn't found dhtml goodies yet. Great resource. I wish I could find some CSS that would allow me to post .gpx tracks. Right now I am relegated to linking back to the ride reports. I have been searching for an online .gpx repository. I have a ton of tracks in dualsportmaps.com but he went belly up and I've forgotten my password and cannot retrieve it now. Oh, well. Live and learn. Thanks for your thoughts on the background. I was thinking that too but I might increase the opacity first and see what I end up with.
That's what I meant with picking the right "format". Get a domain name, buy some shared server space....and you can have your own html pages with links to all your pics stored on the same server plus your own gpx file-storage all in the same place. Rather than buying a domain name through a server, buy independently so it's not tied or regulated....and you can take your site to another server without much trouble if that's what's needed at some point. It's a fairly small outlay all up....somewhere around $50-80/ year for domain name and server space. Most offer free website-building (html) tools to knock up your pages.
I use 1and1.com and godaddy.com. Godaddy is faster setup and configuration when setting up stuff. 1and1 has had much less trouble over the years, but hard to get ahold of, where godaddy has real good customer support. https://www.godaddy.com/domains/sea...269&checkAvail=1&domainToCheck=drzcharlie.com
