Chuck's Travels

I decided a few years ago that I hadn't travelled enough, so I decided to take off and see more. It has been well worth it. Following in the footsteps of friends that had taken similar trips, I decided to record my travels in a blog.

I will admit that with up to 60 total views on some posts, it is more a blog for me than for anyone else. It also became a focus on these trips. I spend probably half an hour to an hour and a half each day between writing the experiences and editing some photos. Sometimes I get behind and have to spend half a day on it. It has forced me to slow down and contemplate a bit more than I might have otherwise. I usually do it in the evenings when it's getting dark and I'm just relaxing in my tent before sleep. And it's been nice to reread my experiences years later. There are many things I have forgotten.

You may have noticed the new blog location and format. When I started this, I wasn't sure if I would keep it up past the first few days, so I used a free service (wix.com). At the time, that was the best choice for a free blog, and they have decent tools. However, my pictures eventually exceeded the free storage limit, and I wanted a bit more control. Plus I was looking for a way to type and format the posts without the internet.

So I looked into static site generators and found something called "makesite" which is a really simple python script. I'm much more familiar with python than javascript and jinja (e.g. eleventy), so it was easier for me to customize it to exactly what I wanted. For example, I post a lot of pictures (probably the only thing most people look at), and I wanted to make them links and add captions. I could have done that with four lines of embedded html for each image, but it would require me to repeat both the filename and caption in there twice which is prone to errors. So I created my own tag and added the code to makesite to handle it. Now I just have to write one line with the filename and caption, and each image appears as I want it to. The thing that I lost was page view statistics, but I can live without. Maybe I'll figure a way to add that in the future.