I had studied HTML code a couple years ago for another hobby web site that I was making.  I resisted using a WYSIWYG editor because I wanted to know how it all worked.  So I bought several books and tried various freeware editors for several months.  I did finally get a grasp of how to write for the web, but it was rough.

I often use a learning style that I call "brute force learning."  I will never be an HTML expert, but I know what I wanted the web site to look like.  So instead of learning HTML per se, I instead figured out each aspect and feature I wanted on the site and figured out how to do each thing separately, referring to the books for the code I needed.  It is slow and plodding, but eventually gets the job done and I get a basic idea of the HTML code that I need to know for my purposes.  It is a thin learning layer, though.  It is never deeply learned and quickly forgotten after I am done with that particular task.

After several years away from writing ugly code, I started this site with the intention of having a web site up for friends and family to follow along with my travels and adventures.  I decided that I needed a better web site and quickly, so I bought an old copy of Front Page 2003.  As usual, I had no idea what I was doing at first, but I eventually got the hang of it.  Mostly, I wanted the features and menus that were beyond the few things I had learned before, so FP2003 was very helpful.

Exactly how the site looked wasn't important at the beginning, but I played around with some themes and settled on something simple but not simplistic.  I am pretty experienced with Paint Shop Pro, so after more experimentation I settled on a rough-textured orange-gold color scheme and patterns for the title graphics.  Other design elements were then altered to match those graphics.  Gold text on a textured black background looked a little cartoonish, but it was different so I stayed with it.  I had to make the text a little larger than I would otherwise have done, since the light-on-dark scheme wasn't as kind to the reader.

What started out as a simple web site for a travelogue quickly evolved into having more pages and elements than I initially intended or wanted.  I confess that FP2003 made some things simple enough that I played around with adding more content than I would ever need.  Still, it was kinda fun although it was very time consuming.

When I decided to include many ride reports from the last few years, it really ate up several days to find and import those reports from various forums.  Mostly, the dirt ride reports were of interest to some friends who didn't spend time on internet forums.  Copying and pasting from some forums was easier than others.  Some imported reports took half an hour, some took several hours.  There are other reports yet to be imported, but I will work on them later.

Unfortunately, I just recently learned that all of my street ride reports that I had intended to import here have been deleted from the forum where they were originally posted!   I still have the photos archived, but the stories, other riders' photos, and the banter are all lost.  Re-creating stories to go with those photos will be very difficult and time consuming, so I may get to it eventually, but not soon.

I host photos on Photobucket, and they recently added a slideshow feature.  When I saw that, I though to add photo albums to this site, and although FP2003's photo gallery options were nice, I liked the Photobucket slideshows better.  Getting the slideshows built on Photobucket was easy but time consuming (since most photos did not have a caption and I decided that each one should).  Everything is time consuming.  But, I figured out how to make the slideshows appear in an in-line frame, and adjusted things to suit most computers and monitors.

Since Don and I are good friends, retired at about the same time, and will be traveling a lot together, I added him to the Ronin roster and duplicated most things to include him.  He'll have to provide his own content, but I'll help him get it into the site.  We might add other people to the Ronin roster if we ride and travel regularly with them.  Our wives are not on the Ronin roster, although my wife has done some of the rides.  She's LaurieD in some of the ride reports. Don's wife, Bev, doesn't ride.  Somewhere early in the idea for this site, I decided to make it a personal site, and not about my family in general.  Don't know why, but there it is.

As much as I was tempted to include stories and material from my recently-finished career, I chose not to since this site is more about the adventures to come than it is about the past (imported ride reports notwithstanding).

The more I refined the site and fixed inconsistencies, the more I kept tweaking things.  I wanted to add a chat room, but gave up the conceit of that, and didn't want to be glued to the computer any more than I already was.  I added the Guestbook and Feedback pages instead.  FP2003 provided the auto-formatted features that I shaped the pages around, so that was fairly quick, aside from creating the title graphics.

The Prudhoe Bay-to-Ushuaia motorcycle ride was the motivation for this site, but the site ended up being more than I intended.  The design process (such as it is...) was fun, and I enjoyed the creative process.

Unfortunately, although everything looked to be working fine, once it was uploaded to my web host, none of the advanced Front Page 2003 features worked.  The web host site supposedly supports FP2003, so it's very frustrating.  None of the advanced menus worked, the hit counter (now removed) never worked, the Guestbook and Feedback pages were non-functioning, there was trouble with inline frames...  Phooey.

The site was simplified to its current state, and may or may not get evolved to something that will play better on the host site.  I'm reluctant to spend the money and time to upgrade to newer software.  Microsoft already has enough of my money.

M.