From the word "go", this website was going to be important to us. We didn't choose this lifestyle to disappear from those we know and love. We want them to experience as much of this journey as possible. This website is meant to be that conduit between us out there and everyone we left shoreside. Telephones are expensive and/or infrequently available. All the places worth going have tenuous to no internet access. That's part of what makes them worth going to. We wanted a system that we could broadcast our whereabouts and how-we're-doings over our single sideband radio in a manner that our family and friends would know that we're ok and understand where we are.
While researching the lifestyle, we consumed massive quantities of other people's blogs and websites. We pulled encyclopedias full of knowledge from the other folks out there on their boats writing about the experiences they're having. Virtually everything we knew about this lifestyle prior to shoving off was gleaned from those out there keeping up websites about their experiences. We felt like we owed a debt to the s/v Gallant Fox's, Project Bluesphere's and s/v Sohcahtoa's (among many many others) that we used for inspiration. We want someone with just the tiniest secret spark of a ridiculous idea to run across our website. We would like take that tiny little spark and gently nurture it.
With napalm.
And so www.svhelloworld.com was born. As all of my programming projects, this one started out simple. A blog, some pictures and cheap web hosting to put up some writings is all I wanted. This site has since snowballed into an AJAX enabled dynamic content management system and custom templating engine sprinkled with whiz-bang Javascript UI effects and dynamic Google maps. Scope creep much?
To say I built this website wouldn't be as accurate as to say I assembled it. There's an enormous amount of great API's, libraries, and web tools out there. I cherry-picked the ones that suited the project and/or I wanted to learn (I'll admit it - there's more than a few features on this site that are here out of curiosity rather than necessity). Then I wrote the connective tissue, built out a templating system and put some CSS lipstick on the pig. This site is actually an amalgam of three different sites. Lemme 'splain:
Site Navigation
site feeds
Recent Blog Entries
© 2008 All content on this page is the property of the owners of this website and cannot be copied or reproduced unless express written permission is granted.
