About this site

Technical details
The main trick to maintaining this web site from abroad is that I burned a CD with a bunch of handy software on it, which I have since installed on countless computers across the world. Handiest by far is a schedulable ftp program that lets me secretly highjack the network in internet cafes, leave for a few days, and return when my 200 MB of pictures have uploaded. I am a bad man.
Digital camera:	I'm using a Canon Powershot G2 with a 1 GB IBM Microdrive. I'm a big fan of this camera. The image quality is great and I particularly like the flexibility afforded by the flip-out viewfinder. The main drawback is the relative bulk of this camera compared to pocket-size versions.
HTML:	The template for my pages was designed using Microsoft Frontpage 4.0. In case you were wondering, the pages are compliant with the W3C XHTML format (except for some issues with movies and the <embed> tag). I did a bit of cross-browser testing to ensure that the site was viewable in all major browsers, but it clearly looks best in IE 5 and above. I'm fine with this. Because my HTML was deliberately kept pretty simple, there are a minimum of compatibility issues. The one problem I did run into is that Netscape 4 handles stylesheets terribly. It doesn't just ignore them (which would be fine), it mangles them. The workaround is to use numeric class names (e.g., img.3 { ... }). Due to a bug, Netscape ignores these.
Web design:	Site navigation was liberally borrowed from my friend Elliot's web site at www.rudesby.com. I made some modifications to suit my needs, and Elliot and I use fundamentally different strategies for page generation, but credit goes to Elliot for the site layout.
Image management:	To arrange pictures into groups, rename them, and perform small corrections (mainly rotation), I used Canon's ZoomBrowser EX software. Unfortunately, this software basically sucks.
Image manipulation:	I use the Image Magick library to do all image manipulation (although I occasionally resort to PhotoShop, particularly for the header image at the top of every page): Batch creation of thumbnails. Images are reduced to widths of roughly 60 pixels, the images are then cropped to a size of 32x44 pixels, and then exported to .gifs. So thumbs are both shrunken and cropped. Batch creation of images for display on the web. The original hi-res files that come out of the camera are reduced to 20% of their original proportions and the colors are sharpened.
Page generation:	I used a bunch of perl scripts to generate the static HTML pages in my album. Here's the basic process: Arrange the images (and movies) into directories. My albums are structured so that all images are two levels below the root directory (e.g. bolivia/chile/santiago/foo.jpg). Use a perl script and the Image Magick libraries to batch create web versions of the photos and thumbnails, called, respectively, foo_web.jpg and foo_thumb.gif. Run a script called to generate an XML file that contains data regarding the images. This data is based on the directory structure I set up in step 1. Edit the XML data file by hand in any way I see fit, such as rearrangement of the ordering of pictures, addition of captions, etc. (This script is reasonably intelligent -- I can rerun it, and it won't clobber my hand edits.) Run a script which reads both the XML data file and an HTML template file, and then generates all the HTML for the site.
ISP:	Hosting for this web site is generously provided by my friend Andrew via his excellent ISP, roarmouse.com.

Best viewed using
Browser:	Internet Explorer 5.x or above. It should work on both Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. It just won't look as pretty. Also, movies are not guaranteed to work.
Screen resolution:	1024x768. The site is designed to work with 800x600 monitors as well, but you will have to do some scrolling.
Movies:	You need the Quicktime plug-in, which you can download from here.