The various trips

- the summer of all trips (95): in my first real travels on my own, I spent a week here and there: London, Lusigny (lake near Troyes), La Baule, Prague, Bratislava, and finally 3 weeks in China, of which one in Tibet. That started the long series of travels.

- the Indonesian year (98): I arrived in February 98 in the middle of an unprecedented economic crisis in South-East Asia, and got a great chance to discover the country. In all, I left Jakarta 35 times to travel, I took off (and landed!) 57 times by plane.... years which are the best of my life so far.

- holidays in Asia (99): in May 98, following the riots, I left Jakarta for more than a long week-end, for a diving course in Malaysia. In 99, I got the opportunity to leave more, of which 2 weeks in Vietnam, then a month and a half in the Sunda islands followed by 5 weeks in Sulawesi.

- Africa (00): back in France, I longed to head off to another adventure. 3 weeks in Southern Africa was more than I expected, thanks to a friend settled in Pretoria, with whom I left for 2 weeks to Namibia along with other friends. I left again in November, touring the highlights of Egyptian civilisation from Cairo to Abu Simbel, Assouan and finally Luxor.

- Europe - the Mediterranean and the capitals (01): settled in London for work, I used this city as a base for travelling... Malta, Tunis, Sicily (Palermo and diving once, West coast another time), Rome, east of Rome, tour of Rome-Florence-Sienna-Venice-Verona-Rome, Toulouse were my sunny destinations, and I also paid a visit to friends in Geneva, Amsterdam and Hungary. I also saw a bit more of the UK: Wales (Cardiff), Oxford and Cambridge.

- Down under (02): I embarked on a 2-month trip to Australia, followed by a month in New Zealand, traveling almost everywhere except Western Australia, with tours, cruises, friends I met along the way, and by hiring cars. It was such a complete break from it all in countries which change so dramatically and boast stunning wildlife.

The various versions

- v1 - the start: I began my site at the end of 99 with a basic freeware, AOL Press. I quickly saw its limits, using scripts it didn't handle, things seen on web sites or taken here and there. With the help of MS Frontpage, I managed my home page decently, but I felt this could not take the site along the path of the growth I planned for it - I I had been methodical about my rich content and thus needed tools to partially automatise the development.

- v2 - progress: moving on to Dreamweaver, I finally had a faster tool to minimise development and focus on content creation... Before, 80% of my time was spent on 20% of what was visible! Using templates as a common backgroung to similar pages, faster access to HTML code (not possible with MS Frontpage), good WYSIWYG (as seen on screen) interface, link management (a file moved or renamed is taken into consideration by pages linking to it), good interface for site upload... many useful functionalities.
With the development of a site dedicated to Southern Africa, I fully realised how much the current version was limited: too focused on Indonesia, not clear, too ambitious and depp, needing too much time. My access to a scanner was limited, the site was stalling and not interesting enough, given its limited topics. Less confidential, clearer, with a ood design (Fireworks), and beautiful pictures, the part on Africa was much more enjoyable and comprehensive... and I had the perfect audience: my travel mates. It was time to get bigger.

- v3 - opening to the world: I spent a considerable number of hours working on a map to finally use it as a home page, linking beyond Indonesia, and preparing the site's more numerous destinations. I also changed host so as not to have an advert banner, and so as to possibly use a MySQL database.

- v4 - the PHP/MySQL big bang (sept 01): after weeks of trying hard to program in PHP, I managed to develop dynamic pages that send requests to a database. This enables me to focus mainly on pictures and texts, and hardly on development and page creation, because all I need is to add lines to the database. Tough but worth it, although access to PHP pages is slow on Free. So the site is quite ready to host the upload of all the different pictures and stories, the maps being the only element which is still very time consuming.
Also, language management is much better with PHP... now it's just a question of translating!

- v5 - full out PHP (sept 02): exactly a year after going with the first PHP pages, I have converted all pages to php to generate my own statistics and have unique files managing both languages. My former provider of free statistics has moved to charging a monthly fee, so I take care of the analysis myself now thanks to inserts into the database each time a visitor loads a page. This also allows "best of" pages.

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