Over the course of our four week trip, I authored
about 50 pages for this web site. This includes 166 unique images plus 39
image duplicates at higher resolutions in case people were interested in seeing
more detail.
Before the trip I set up a simple template that was used for all the pages,
and I relied heavily on tables to layout the images and text in a reasonable
and legible way. I also set a standard way to name the pages and groups of
images to make them both easy to organize and easy to upload. I authored everything
using Netscape Composer, a simple WYSIWYG tool that comes free with Netscape
Navigator.
I would estimate that each page took 45 minutes to an hour to author, meaning
that I put in a solid work week during the trip just authoring the pages.
I enjoyed doing this, though, as my motivation was to have a written and visual
record of the trip for our family to remember it by - it is kind of a Journal
Lite with pictures. I enjoyed it even more as the trip progressed and I got
great responses in both the guestbook and via email from people who were
getting a kick out of following along. I had an audience! I uploaded pages
every three to five days as we happened to have Internet access, and at that
time would send out an email alert to a list of about 45 people that we compliled
before the trip.
The vast majority of authoring time was spent on image selection and manipulation.
All the images were shot on a 3.3 megapixel Olympus camera at 2048x1536 pixel
resolution. I didn't want to upload images at that size, and I know no one
wanted to wait for them to download. We averaged over 30 pictures a day (meaning
we shot over 1000 digital pictures), so I first had to select three to five
that would say the most about the day. After that I would crop the images
if needed and resize them to typically 300x400 and also save a larger version
if necessary.
Uploading time was usually pretty fast. I used a program called WS_FTP95LE
to FTP the data to the host machine. The only time it was really slow was
in Moran (the Grand Tetons) where I uploaded about five days worth of pages
on a 28k dialup line. That took better than half an hour.
The only thing I would want to add would be some video. I didn't bring the
firewire cable to bring video in from our DV camera, so that wasn't an option.
The Olympus camera can shoot web-ready videos which I tried a number of times,
though I never got anything that was worth the effort to upload from it.