Site Update – What that Flock?

Yo Bill, What is up with the BLOG?

Well, its complicated but the short answer is I have been busy. I have been doing a lot of utilitarian things with the site to make it mobile friendly and to allow for some other things I want to do in the future. The site is over 20 years old and some of the HTML needs some freshening up. Over the course of those 20 years I have had numerous revisions and code conventions that have changed resulting in genres of pages that need to be standardized before I can really move forward with things. While much can be done with scripts, I basically need to touch every page and I have over 200 hundred trails on the site.

One particularly time consuming bit is fixing thumbnails. Back in “The Day” the drop shadow effect was not an HTML/CSS function. I generated that using a custom Photoshop action script. The shadow and the background on that shadow were part of the the thumbnail image itself. Thus my site’s dirt/sand colored background is baked into the cake of all the thumbnails. Part of the project is to get rid of those baked in shadows and replace them with modern CSS/HTML functions. Once again scripts, actions, find/replace and batch processes help but I have to touch every page.

While all of the pages are now viewable to some degree on mobile, a little over 100 of them have yet to fully converted. It is an ongoing process and not one I do all the time. I still like riding my bike and I really enjoy spending quality time with my lovely wife. So that is the happenings with the site’s pages.

Now this BLOG. You may have noticed I have not done too much with it since my big trip last year. Social media plays a part in this and I have not figured out if they should supplant this or not. I have settlef on I think not. Social media has its place but I think the BLOG is going to stay around. I intend go do some “backfilling” of content from the last year. So I will be publishing some new content with old dates to when they occurred.

But hey, all of this takes time and I think it is time to go for a ride instead of banging on a keyboard.

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One thought on “Site Update – What that Flock?”

  1. Thanks much for all your hard work! This site is a great resource. I’m still a bit shocked you guys waded into some of the skeevier backcountry in the San Gabriels. Alder Creek?!?!? Yikes.

    Back in the early-mid ’90s I did my own site, TRs and photos, and links to other folks’ sites. The thumbnails were all shrunken versions of the original, hand-modified with a phony ’embossed’ look by doing a lighten/darken effect to the top-left and bottom-right edges, 2 pixels deep. I created hundreds of thumbnails in this fashion, with a low-rent version of Photoshop called Micrografx Picture Publisher. As you appear to have done, I hand-drew all my maps using Wildflower Topo! software.

    Anyway, nostalgia…

    Thanks again! KIR!

    Tom

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