About this site
Some history. The real short version.
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| Outside of the Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument, Escalante, Utah |
I had some free web space where I worked, and I wanted to learn some HTML (I was running a user web server, after all), so I had this brilliant insight to put my vacation pictures up on a website. Everyone by that time had some sort of dial-up access or DSL, so it was a combination of a learning experience, and a virtual replacement for a physical photo album (or slideshow on compact-disc, which I suppose was still a physical object...).
Ha!
Yeah, it was easy to slop something together and make it work. The Markup Language (the ML in HTML) was pretty easy, and got something working within days.
I soon came to realize I'd have to learn a styling language with a completely different syntax to actually format a web page... A pain, but not that bad. Rewriting the site at that time was still a learning experience.
Then... Standards? The web had standards? Who the hell decided that? And the site was rewritten (again) to get rid of the most egregious problems.
It was workable for a little while, but it became apparent it was going to be a maintenance nightmare. Digital replaced film, and I started taking hundreds of photos instead of dozens. And not unrelated, computer monitor resolutions were increasing.
So over a few years, I had to develop a more standardized way of creating website pages. I also abandoned any dial-up users, and compromised on a larger standard image size.
Then came smartphones. They laughed at the guy who said there'd be a computer on everyone's desk, and now everyone has one in their pocket. Damn those tiny, high-resolution screens. I finally had to admit I had to learn (or at least use) Java, since I needed better control over how the website worked, and Java was now pretty much debugged, standardized and built into every modern browser.
My long standing policy to support legacy browsers quickly eroded after companies started dropping support on old software, which made them a network liability. (You need a modern browser to run this site. Modern is a relative term. It has to support standardized Java.)
The website was out of control. I know I had duplicate images, and because of how the original site was designed, there were almost 90k files for 18k images.
At that point, I came to the sad conclusion I was going to have to change how the website operated, both inside and out. So I decided to do the only reasonable thing. I stared over. Sorta. In the industry, it's called a reorganization.
Are you bored yet? It gets really bad from here...
The new version is Version 5. I was actively working on a version 4, and had most of the infrastructure in place, but then things got changed completely when I started to use Java. Internally, the new version looked nothing like the old, and there was no reason to finish something that was going to be obsolete...
Goals:
Standardize and streamline the site. There was a lot of feature creep that crept into the newer pages, but were never implemented into the older pages.
Make navigation easier, especially the "slideshows".
Reduce the number of files.
Remove duplicate and spurious images from multi-year trips. For instance, how many pictures of the Lower Falls in Yellowstone do you need? I have pictures of the falls from all three trips. So, an effort was made to remove pictures with very a similar image.
Things done for the version 5 upgrade:
Hotkeys for page navigation have been enabled. Prior versions were all mouse based, and made page navigation a nightmare, since buttons would move around with the image.
Prior to v5, slideshows were a forward and backward linked-list, where every image had to have its own HTML file. Version 5 moves to a java based slideshow involving one HTML file per slideshow.
All pictures (and thumbnails) were centralized into a single location, eliminating all duplicate image files.
Between this and the slideshow conversion above, I've been able to eliminated around 50,000 files on the site, from around 90K to 40K files.
Version 4 had large slide shows. A Road Trip (or Theme Park) could have over 1,000 images. While there might be 8 to 10 Place Pages for that trip, the slideshow was still a single 1,000+ image slideshow. Load times were noticable.
The new version has a slideshow for each Place Page. So if there are 8 pages for that Road Trip or Theme Park, there will be 8 slideshows, all linked together. This is pretty much invisible to the user, and makes load times less noticeable.
I finally admitted to myself that outside of a few "events", all of my pictures were of "places". Even the theme parks and other stuff contents were places. So I restructured how the web site is presented based on places, rather than breaking them up in arbitrary categories. (This was a version 4 goal, fully implemented. Well, mostly anyway...)
Video support will be moved to YouTube. If you were looking for a video here, it will eventually be hosted on YouTube.
On the average, I'd say I've removed 20% or more of the images from the Place Pages, due to being multi-year duplicates, or images that have no interest or connection to the Place. Road Trips and Trip Reports remain intact, since they're essentially photo albums of a trip. This is why Road Trips and Trip Reports may have images that a Place page does not.
All version creep has been eliminated. (I think.) By that I mean page improvements made to later written pages were implemented to the older pages. So the site should look and feel more consistent throughout.
Wow. If you're still reading, congratulations...
For the type of website I'm running (and a few other reasons), I wasn't very happy with my old hosting company. So a decision was made as version 5 was close to completion that like the website, I should just start over.
So I did.
Found a new hosting company (with faster servers) and a website name I liked better than the one I had, and BackroadJunkie.com was born. It took a few days to convert the site to Backroad's site, uploaded it, and found the new hosting company used UNIX servers.
My original site was on a Unix System V machine, but as I outgrew the measly quota at work, I moved the site to a real hosting company with a real domain name. I was now on a dos (okay, a windows) server. Case didn't matter. "Abc" was "ABc" was "ABC". Now, it mattered. I paid for my sloppiness, but to be honest, it could have been a lot worse. Since the site started on a Unix system, there was a lot of uniformity discipline that was followed, lol.
One irony is, the software I use to actually create the slideshows is an Unix shell script. When I originally developed the site on that Unix machine, I just used a shell script to generate html code. It morphed from building linked lists to building slide shows, almost using the same input files from previous versions. It's a very similar process.
But it's all done, and I've got a clean bill of no 404's. But it's a painful process trying to remember everything you have to do for a new site. Sitemaps, new analytics tracking, new icon, setting up an .htaccess and robots file, etc.
I suspect the site will go live October 8, 2022.
So the huge reorganization is still "In Process", but if you're reading this, it's in a shape that can be used online...
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- September 2022 - Upgrade to v5.0.
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