[ifonline]

No problem.

[dhgeyer]

This forum won't let me post a message with a link until I've posted 10 messages. I've posted 9 so far, so this will be 10. Ignore this one. The next one has a link in it.

[dhgeyer]

Originally Posted by ifonline

Interesting. I do this too, except I update my blog (Ride Reports) after the trip. That way I can cull through my images and prep them for upload.

I know how you feel about not riding as much as you would like. I was just saying this evening that I can't wait for it to warm up just a bit. I'm looking forward to riding down to St. Simon's again. I love long weekend rides.

Interesting site you built there, Ian. I like the way you put it together. Thanks for the link.

In the past I have done sort of what you have done: put together a web page for each trip after the fact, when I had the benefit of Photoshop and my computer. I've never really consolidated them, as you have. I've posted them on websites that I created/maintain for my high school graduating class (East Aurora (NY) High School Class of 1964), and for my local motorcycle club.

But this time, I thought it would be fun to do one live, posting as I go. This would be on a longer trip - several weeks, with entries every day. This way, my friends can follow the fun. I'll want to set it all up before I leave, so that each entry won't be starting from scratch, and I'll need to do only minimal editing on the BB as I add text and images. Of course I'll lose some photo editing ability, so the images won't be quite as nice, but that's a trade off.

A few years ago, I did do a compilation of some photos that I had taken up to that point, entitled "Lost In America", which was kind of a text/photo essay about how I feel about riding, America, and photography. I've provided a link to that below, if anyone is interested.

Lost In America

[ifonline]

I'll check out the site, thanks. And thanks for the comments on my blog. I appreciate it.

As for a daily "live" journal of my trips, I actually use Facebook for that. Works very, very well, and gives friends and family a place to see what I'm doing stop by stop, day by day, and it includes pictures.

My thinking was that I didn't need to re-invent the wheel. Facebook is well established, my friends and family use it already, and I can get a Facebook application for my BlackBerry that lets me manage photo uploads, status comments, etc. Why do I need to struggle with uploading hourly/daily to my own site when that process is going to be a pain at best, especially when Facebook exists?

So, I use Facebook for "live" updates for our trips via status comments. I take photos with my BlackBerry and upload them to a photo album on Facebook made specifically for the trip. At the same time, I take photos with my digital camera and save them for use when I get home, and upload them to my blog along with details comments and descriptions after the trip has finished.

I really believe it's a great system that has served me well last year. I'll be putting it into place this year when our weekend trips start up again.

[F0nage]

Thanks DH, I'll be watching your and Ian's pages!

What I don't like about facebook is you have to sign up for it to see anything. I prefer setups like blogs where I can browse what I want without posting details about myself.

[dhgeyer]

Ian,

It sounds like Facebook is a good answer for you. I have an account there. I didn't set it up; my daughter did. I've poked around it a little bit, but haven't really used it much. I've accumulated quite a few friends. I haven't even looked at it in weeks.

That answer wouldn't work well for me for what I'm trying to do. We're different generations, you and I. Much of mine is slower to adapt to computers, and technology in general. Very few of the people I want to share my experiences with are on Facebook. Most of my high school class members have learned to use the website I created and maintain for them, as have the members of my motorcycle club. So I'll reach more of the people I want to reach with that medium. Also, with Facebook, if you have a lot of "Friends", status updates tend to get lost in the clutter of all the information getting posted. A dedicated web page/site will allow people who want to to pay more attention to what I'm doing. It may be a pain to do it, as you say, but I think it'll be fun, too.

Anyway, it'll be fun to try it out.

[ifonline]

Fair enough. Certainly nothing wrong with using your own site. And yeah, Facebook isn't the answer for everyone. It definitely has its drawbacks.

[dhgeyer]

Update on my experience with PaderSync. I got it, paid for it, loaded it, and got it working. In early testing it generally looked good. I did manage to upload a few photos to my website with it, but it didn't always work. Now it almost never does, and I've given up on it. It uploads small files reliably (say under 10 k or so), but with anything big enough to be a .jpg it stops in the middle of the upload, and eventually times out. It does this over 90% of the time.

All is well, however. I contacted my web hosting service, and talked them into activating the file upload function in PHP. They had to set three variables on the server, and only two were set. After that, I just wrote my own HTML/PHP script to upload files, and that works like a charm.

PaderSync seems to work fine as a file management system on the BB, and for what it costs I'm glad to have it for that. But as a way of uploading photo files through FTP to a website, it doesn't seem to work.

[F0nage]

That doesn't make any sense. I've moved files big and small with it on BB and Nokia. Then again I am using sftp so it may not be the same code path.

Anyway you should contact the developer, he's pretty responsive and I think he cares about his products.