You may have read on the front page of my website that I started the website project, to share pictures from the inventor trip, with co-travellers and other interested persons.
This may sound odd from today’s perspective, as such things are nowadays created as an Instagram Story, or may be shared by Facebook (also outdated).
However, when we did this trip, it was in the year 2000 and the technology available was far different from today. In 2006 I was in a medical spa sport camp, and this time I used a blog to share pictures and news with family and friends.
Neither me, nor one of our fellow travelers had a digital camera in 2000. Everyone used analog cameras and some of us had video cameras. Mobile phones were of the kind of the Nokia 3310, which featured phone calls and SMS. By the way, the travelers from Europe could not use their phones, as GSM was not widely rolled out in North America, and on top another Frequency band was in use. Only a few years later, multiband mobiles were getting common. Today a mobile supports up to 20 different bands and transmission modes. I.e. the Canada visitors used coin boxes to get in touch with the family, but we were mainly offline from home. WLAN was also not a common thing in Hotels at that time, and I cannot recall that anyone had a notebook brought to the trip.
Back to the situation in 2000, we all took pictures with our more or less advanced analog cameras, and one day the camera was left in the Hotel. I quickly bought a Kodak disposable one way camera in a souvenir shop, to cover that day, and this simple camera produced surprisingly quite good quality pictures.
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I can recall a situation in 1996, when I worked with my team on GPRS (Data Packet Radio for GSM) in standardization. We had to report the work and progress to the top R&D management of the public network group, and there was a deep skepticism on a need for mobile data transmission beyond circuit switched connections, and especially for any need of wider band uplink provision. When we were asked what the users shall do with this feature, we explained that in the future users for example may connect a digital camera with a phone (we did not dream about smart phones or cameras in phones) and upload photos more or less instantly to hosted pages. This was found to be a freaky and unbelievable application, and was called an absurd business model.
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When I returned from the trip, I brought my negatives to the photograph, to get them developed. At least the technology was advanced so far that in addition to the paper photos, I could order CD’s with digital copies of the Photos. This was not cheap, but better than trying to scan a large amount of paper photos, one by one. These CD’s had been the foundation of the website material, which is far larger than the selected photos on the website.
The original website was made with Netscape Composer. Netscape was a popular browser that time, and an editor was part of it. Indeed, it required html coding for embedding links and pictures, which I learned quickly. FTP tools for uploading to a host had also been quite rudimentary in the user interface, requiring a lot of trial and error. But the most common problem of websites is the static nature. After creation it was okay for a while, but especially the private and professional sites needed regular updates, which developed more and more awkward. Frankly for some years the site was not in really good shape, especially as I had to change the site host, and some functions were getting lost, links and emails outdated and so forth. When I retired, I was considering killing the website as a whole.
But then a Covid infection in 2022 nailed me into quarantine for two weeks, and especially for the first week, I was impacted by the virus, but not so strong that I could not work on my computer. This led to the idea of doing a full re-launch of my website. I studied what is state of the art, and finally used wordpress to create the sites new, based on the existing content. After a bit of a frustrating day 1, I managed by means of video tutorials, to load a word press version on my host’s PHP server. After this success the re-creation of the original websites was going smoothly. I used some standard layout provided by the tool, and did not waste any time for customization. The charm of the tool is that publishing and editing is tightly linked. When you spot a typo or a bad phrasing, you can go into an edit mode, and modify directly on the server, rather than dealing with FTP up- and downloads. The more easy editing also motivated me to add more content. Indeed, when I return after a couple of weeks to add or update something, I need some time to remember some tricks, but in general the tool is easy and good for keeping websites alive.