About the Travelog
This page contains information about the Travelog system:
Development History
Travelog was developed on and off by Nik Makepeace from September 2001 through to the present. The first release was ready mid March 2002. During this period Nik also took a nice holiday to Japan, achieved ELT certification and moved house. It hasn't been an easy ride.
It was started as a project for Nik to learn PHP and to give him a away of keeping in touch with friends and family at home when he moved overseas. Soon enough it became a multi-user system (as a challenge) underwent a redesign, acquired more features, underwent another redesign, absorbed email capability, underwent the final (I hope) redesign, and finally ended up as it is now.
Credits
All development was done by Nik Makepeace. However, it would have been much harder without the assistance of the following:
- Paul Makepeace, for hosting me at Real Programmers
- The css-discuss mailing list
- BlueRobot for the start of the layout
- Eric Meyer for a really good idea or two
- Nick Antrobus for help, advice and being a great colleague in an awful company
Special thanks are also due to: PaladinX for his invaluable testing, and for being on the other side of the world so that he was awake at the same time as me; Kate in Cairo for copy/pasting a backend operation she wasn't supposed to see, and lots of MacIE reports; Stephanie @ Violet Sky for her very helpful MacIE testing; Mat Hampson who made me a favicon when I really couldn't be bothered... and also provided some good constructive UI advice in the early months, and who provided the first new stylesheet (Faster) in 2 years!; Samir M Nassar whose Konqueror comments were much appreciated; David Greig for an IE6/Win heads-up.
Who owns what?
Basically, everything I wrote is Copyright Nik Makepeace 2001-2003. That being said, anything anyone writes on Travelog obviously belongs to them and is not Nik's copyright. So: site design and source code is ©Nik Makepeace, while contributed site content is © the author. If you contribute a stylesheet, it remains yours, but by uploading it to travelog you give me permission to make derivative works without license.
Technical details
Travelog is written in PHP4 with a smidgeon of shell scripting thrown in. The database server is MySQL, the http server is Apache 1.3 and it all runs on a Debian GNU/Linux system. There are around 150 files in the Travelog system, excluding graphics files.
The .yatta
file extension that all the pages have means We did it!
in Japanese, and is the name of a fantastic Japanese novelty pop song by a bunch of total weirdos called Happatai. Anyone who has seen the video or heard the single (especially the Extended Mix) cannot fail to understand why I reconfigured Apache to serve .yatta files. And of course, VeLoSo needs a mention for pointing me in the direction of Happatai in the first place.
Travelog does its best to be a good web citizen, and tries to honour the W3C recommendations on how to markup and present documents for the WWW. One of the effects of this is that Travelog does not exclude people from using the site due to any visual impairment they might have, because Travelog pages can be easily read by people using non-graphical browsers such as braille readers, text browsers, voice browsers etc. Currently this means it is presented in XHTML and CSS2.
Contributions and feedback are especially welcome. Contact Nik Makepeace with your suggestion or contribution for a place in the credits list above. If you are a PHP hacker, contact me for the source and license info.
Conditions of Use
There are no conditions of use for authors or readers, but Nik Makepeace reserves the right to prevent you or anyone else from using Travelog if he has a problem with it in anyway. Relax though, he's not likely to do anything without a warning first.
The Travelog system itself is available for modification and reuse under the usual terms. Contact Nik Makepeace for source, database structure, and license information.
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