Maintaining a web site on the road,how?
 

Hi!

How to maintain my web site on the road,
i'll carry my Laptop
and want to update once in a week.
Should i use sat phone,
or GSM roaming,example:AT&T has 220 roaming partners and prices from 1,20 to 5 $/minute for voice
Or how do you guys do it?

I dont want to mess with public computers in remote places if i dont have to.
Is it posible to connect my laptop to a internet caffe's LAN network or something,
Other wise i'll have to cary a bunch of unrealible flopy's and mess with them in a caffe,and it will take ages,since i plan to have a big picture galary on my site.




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cheers

jondoe

[This message has been edited by jondoe (edited 22 July 2003).]

You can setup the website so that you can update it from any web browser at any internet café on the road. All you have to do is to log in and enter a username and password and write away.

The simplest way is load software on your site called Blog, which works like a journal. You just add entries and it will publish them on your home page. The other option is software called CMS (Content Management System). That’s a bit more elaborate system, but still easy to use, that allows you to categorize articles, news, photos, etc.

I would these methods rather than prepare the pages on my laptop and beg cyber cafes to let me plug in or use an expensive phone connection.

If you need more details, just ask. Hope this helps.


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A.B.

OasisPhoto.com – Images from the Magical Sahara.
ShortWheelbase.com – Jeep preparations.

Well A.B and Jondoe,

We have the same problem and question: also a website that needs to be updated. We can't use a blog since we have a personalized website (http://www.traveladdict.be) where we want to put our pictures and stories. So blog is not an option.
We can prepare everything on our laptop, but then it has to be put on the internet.
In internetcafés you can't always install dreamweaver, so we have to plug in directly with the laptop.
So we have basically the same question : can we just connect to the internet with our laptop with modem and update our site? We're from Belgium so if we use our current telephone number it would be quite expensive. So can we dial in in each country (West Africa btw) with a different number to be able to call locally? Or how does all this stuff work?

TravelAddict,

You say your site is "custom" - I looked and understand, BUT a blog is still possible. Use Moveable Type and you can customise it completely to look just like the rest of your site. Use it for uploading pictures and text to a diary like section. Pictures are no problem, and you can tweak the code on an entry easily.

Otherwise getting an internet cafe to allow you to connect your laptop can be extremely difficult. Try it at a cafe near your house - good luck! Otherwise you need to dial in to somewhere;, for instance Compuserve has nodes around the world, also AOL, and I think IBM worldnet. All are tricky, and the calls can still be very expensive.

It's much easier to use an internet cafe and blog software. Just take the time to tweak it. Our travellers stories section uses MT - have a look. Link on left.

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Grant Johnson

Seek, and ye shall find.
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One world, Two wheels.
www.HorizonsUnlimited.com

As Grant said there are Blog and CMS software that are customizable and capable of handling all sorts of media. You will spend time customizing it’s template with Dreamweaver at home. On the road all you have to do is upload your data and everything will be arranged properly on the site.

Take a look at Mambo, it’s a very easy to use and customize CMS that’s capable of managing your whole site complete with pictures and everything you can imagine. I’m using it to build a Photography and desert travel community for Egypt at Oasis Photo Community. I’ve used Dreamweaver to customize it to look like my main site Oasis Photo.

Depending on your web development skills, there are easier or more complicated and capable solutions out there. Give me an idea about your skills and I’ll point you in the right direction.

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A.B.

OasisPhoto.com – Images from the Magical Sahara.
ShortWheelbase.com – Jeep preparations.

[This message has been edited by A.B. (edited 21 August 2003).]

Why not just bring the laptop with all the software (e.g dreamweaver etc.) do all the coding and then just save it on a floppy. Go to the internet cafe and upload. Then you wont need blog... The floppy has plenty of room for pics as well. If not just get a portable burner, they are cheap these days.

Contact Vodafone they have a mobile connect card this works over GPRS and you only pay for the volume of data passed not call time, will not work everywhere but covers most of Europe.

John

My laptop has a CD-RW drive, so I do everything offline. Most internet cafes in Central and South America have been fine about me putting a cd in and uploading.

saves massively on live online writing.

Rich

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Richb
http://www.postmaster.co.uk/~richardbeaumont/60684/

Richard,

beginners question here, but . . .
how do you upload to your website from the CD?
don't you need a ftp programme? or do you have that on your disc as well?

thanks for any advice.

Huey

Huey,

You author the website on your laptop and burn the files on a CD which you load into an internet café computer for upload using FTP or any other mechanism depending on your web site.

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A.B.

OasisPhoto.com – Images from the Magical Sahara.
ShortWheelbase.com – Jeep preparations.
Coordinates Converter – Lat/Long <-> UTM Conversion Tool.

Huey
MS Internet Explorer (the standard browser) works well as an FTP programme.

Just find out your FTP address and type it in the address line. The protocol will be ftp:// rather than http:// which is the world wide web protocol but it's basically as straightforward as that.

Here's an example from a well known web site provider:
ftp://ftp.tripod.com/

There are quirks with FTPing but it mainly affects transfering from FTP server to FTP server rather than uploading. For example, you can't drag files from one FTP location to another. You have to download to your hard drive and then upload but that's about it.

Hope that helps. Stephano

[This message has been edited by Stephano (edited 26 May 2004).]

[This message has been edited by Stephano (edited 26 May 2004).]

Hi!

For my website http://www.schnueriger.net i use postnuke as my content management system. Your server will need to support php and as database preferrably mysql. To update my page i go to an internet cafe, log in to my webpage, write some articles or upload some photos. Very comfortable, but needs some computer skills to customize. Installing is quite easy if you have upload all files to your server. Take a look at http://www.postnuke.com/

Marco

email your wife who graciously uploads it minus most of the cursing! http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/ubb/smile.gif

http://users.netlink.com.au/~asimpson

Well here's my tuppence worth. I'm a biker and a geek. Some 47 bikes and 35 years later and over 10 since I started on the net...well...my mate who has been RTWing for the last 4 1/2 years..we set him up with a Psion5 but the reality is that cafes have proved best for him.

For me, although I have a small Sony laptop I'd simply take my Smartphone with Win Mobile 2003 now. It has a 256min SD card if I need to take it out to plug it in to a machine. I can text edit a webpage and upload via FTP direct from the phone so that means wee videos and pics too via GSM or GPRS or pass thro to a USB cable to a PC. I also have a USB watch that cost 15 quid which has a CF card built in and has essential software on it.

My smartphone can take a small folding keyboard too for those days when predictive text is a pain.

For power I'd use one of these adapted

http://www.action-replay.co.uk/Compu..._adapter.shtml

The keyboard is here

http://shop.orange.co.uk/shop/show/a...orange_spv/all

The phone here

http://shop.orange.co.uk/shop/show/h...pv_c500/detail

Just my tuppence worth...

John

A quick demo of what can be done with a tiny smartphone.

http://cool.buzznet.com/user/?id=567928

I used this guy's site to give you a demo of uploading a pic and text straight from a phone using email to FTP

http://www.coolsmartphone.com/index....=page&SubMenu=

Just an idea....All you need is a smart phone ....weighing 100g plus a charging solution from the bike. If not wanting to do via GSM or GPRS it can all wait till you get access to a PC for cheapness.

There are obviosuly variations to the theme using server side content management to make stuff look pretty on your own webserver. Personally I just want simple content i.e pics and text.

John