I updated the Trip Diaries main page with some new stats for countries and continents and changed the Upcoming Travels section. Still looking for that major redesign!
Also updated the site-wide copyright files to 2010! I have a nagging feeling that somewhere I have forgotten a gallery page that has the wrong data, but I will check it out throughout the year.
I also in the last week have added nav links at the top of the What's New page to make it easier to get back to the main Club Josh site.
Maybe not massive in the number of Gorn photos added, but it is the first structure change since v 18.1 in March 2001! Since I needed to find a location for the South America photos, I split Asia and Oceania so that now there are 6 photo galleries on the Gorn page instead of 4.
The sections are now: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and Celebrity. I guess when I make it to Africa, things will get a bit creative. This was an easy fix, so maybe when I go on Safari, I will just go to smaller thumbnails, or god forbid, a redesign of the Gorn pages!
Updates include the addition of nav links to the new pages at the top of each page, the movement of Asia and Oceania to each own pages, 34 new photos of Argentina in the South America section, the change of the Gorn Page 2009 to Gorn Page 2010, and finally an update of the places the Gorn has been. Long ago, I started a Google Map for the Gorn, but got bogged down. Originally, I was going to link to a photo in each pin location, but I think for the sake of sanity, I will just add the pins.
I also discovered that I used a random copyright file for the Gorn pages which is why some of the pages had 2008 copyrights instead of 2009. They have been updated to 2010 in advance of the sitewide change next week.
I started working on a new Club House page and as a result started poking around at a few minor things that were amiss on the site.
First up: Deleted the old Lite site that I no longer use. As a reminder everything is now in m.clubjosh.com. As a result I deleted the old PDA link under the What's New links on the index page.
Next: Updated the old robots.txt file from the old server. There were a lot of directories that no longer exist (old galleries that are long gone!)
Finally: Made the Flickr thumbnail on the index page a local image since if you are looking at clubjosh from behind a domain that blocks Flickr you see nothing.
I still haven't finished the new Club House, but it is close. Hope to get it up before vacation.
Added a photo of Huell Howser to the Gorn page! Pretty exciting that I got a photo of him with the Gorn. Also cleaned up the URL link on the Gorn index page to the Celebrity page.
Added 63 new Gorn photos of the Southeast USA from my recent trip. Updated North America page as well as the index page to reflect the addition.
On the Trip Diaries page, I updated my state count list as well as my forthcoming trip list. Sure need to finish that redesign so all the Diaries on the mobile site can be converted to web sites!! I also added links to the full Flickr gallery for my trip.
Added photos to Flickr of Europe 2002, NYC 2003, and Boston 2005. All accessible via links on the Trip Diaries page.
Lately, I have been reminiscing about times gone by, and for whatever reason it caused me to go through the site and make a list of problems and changes that I want to make. I can't believe how long it has been that the SSIs are not working on the Trip Diaries pages. The older galleries from the 90s really suffered.
Therefore, I finally did something about it and fixed all the old legacy headers and SSI issues so that they are at least presentable and not embarrassing. Heck, I think the Europe 1998 gallery has been offline for at least 3 years!
I now have two pages of notes of stuff to fix and make the site an accurate 2009 representation of what I want Club Josh to be. Diaries has the most work to be done, and I think that is why some of the problems have been left to linger for so long.
I finally pushed the new home page for the 14th Anniversary. It actually got pushed a two days late, but I was having some HTML validation issues. Since some of the code on the page is pushing 8 years old, I tried to refresh it to make it at least HTML 4. I probably still have some validation issues, but most are gone according to the Dreamweaver validator.
I am still not happy with the spacing of the Twitter posts - it looks to close to me and is a bit difficult to read. I am tinkering with it and trying to find a good example of how to space the entries out more, but that involves some more learning and time and effort. I hope to have it fixed soon!
I originally wanted a new Trip Diaries page to launch at the same time, but it is proving to tough with my current schedule to devote any reasonable time to work on it. Perhaps I should give myself a year to completely re-do the entire site??
I also updated the Evolution page!
I was perusing some old photos and discovered that I needed to update some of the text on the links page, actual links on the links page, as well as modify the intro text on the main Gorn index page. Here is the old text to live on in perpetuity:
No one is quite sure how the legend of the Gorn was born. I think it was one day a few years ago, my friends wanted me
to go on a camping trip with them to Death Valley and Zion National
Park. Unfortunately I was unable to go. I said to my friends, "Why
don't you just take something of mine and take a picture of it in front
of some signs or whatever so I am there in spirit." My friends Joe,
Susie, Wendy and Steven picked the Gorn and a legend was born. All these years later, we have a whole photo album of the Gorn travels, and T-Shirts to commemorate the "Merciful and Quick Gorn World Tour". There are many photos of the Gorn, and we have chosen a select few to display here. Enjoy!
As you can tell, it has been way more than "a few years ago" since we are over 15 years from the first Gorn Adventure in Death Valley and although I still have that first Gorn photo album, the majority of the photos are now of the digital variety! I also fixed a typo from the beginning - its Stephen not Steven! You can read the revised text on the main index page.
I tried to avoid v24 and save it for a new home page redesign, but there were some Gorn photos to publish first, so oh well. I added 11 photos of the Gorn in Mammoth. I am still doing some tweaks here and there to a new home page (you can test if you add index2.html to the home page url). It will feature a live status update feed from twitter that also feeds Facebook. I think the only thing holding it back is some minor graphic work on the header as well as the eternal desire that the Club House and Trip Diaries home pages would reflect the new 1024 width and design elements. The current plan is to finish those two pages before the anniversary date in June!
