This site
was designed to share my personal adventures and travels with
others. By telling my stories, I hope to inspire people to
get out and do something they've always wanted to do and to
have the courage and determination to pursue and achieve ANY
goal. I have no secret bank account that allows me to fund
such trips - I merely work hard to save money and then
spend it doing what makes me happy. Absolutely anyone can
do the same things that I have done. Limits and boundaries
are only fears created in the mind. And ok, if you can't get
away from the office then you can live somewhat vicariously
through me!
Creating this site was one of the
goals that I set out to achieve in 2001 before leaving
for my trip. I started by taking an HTML class at a local
community college and began building pages from there. I
worked on older trips first (Kilimanjaro) to test the water
and figure out what was going on. I then took an Adobe
Photoshop class and started working on an overall design.
I wanted to create a site that I could update from any internet
cafe in any country in the world, and I did not want to
have to load my own ftp software onto each computer I used
to do it. For that reason I decided to design a dynamic
web site using a database to store all of my journal entries
and photos. I did this using active server pages (asp).
I taught myself how to program in asp in merely 10 days
just before leaving for my trip. That was no small feat
- I didn't sleep much in those 10 days! Creating this site
has been a tremendous amount of work but it's been awesome
to get it all together and to know that I learned so much
by doing it myself.
Perhaps the hardest part though is
actually staying on top of the site while you are out and
about because it can get quite hard when you are busy climbing
mountains and doing other things and don't exactly have
easy access to a computer all the time. Keep this in mind
when you don't see an update for awhile folks! Compared
to a lot of other travel sites I've seen, I think I do a
pretty decent job of keeping things updated considering
most that I've seen are at least six months behind where
they actually are.
I hope you enjoy reading through
the site! If you have any suggestions or comments please
send them to Momo,
my trusty cat and Public Relations Manager. (Please be sure to include a specific subject in the heading of your email because we get loads of junkmail and we've missed quite a few emails from people who merely said 'Hi' or 'hey' or 'NA' in the subject. Momo does respond to every email he gets, so if you don't receive a reply that means your message got lost in the abyss of spam.) Thanks for checking out the site!
|
