A Little Nostalgia...
/As I was writing my last blog about updating our website, www.JustALittleFurther.com, I began reminiscing about the difficulties of starting our website and keeping it up to date in the early days of our sailing odyssey. During the first couple of years aboard Nine of Cups, Marcie kept a daily journal as well as our ship’s log, documenting our day-to-day activities. Then in 2002, we launched our actual website, www.nineofcups.com. If you’d like a little history about the evolution of our website from its beginnings til now read on. I guarantee it’s a sure-fire cure for insomnia!
A little history...
Way back in 2002, we had only been aboard Nine of Cups for two years and were real novices at the sailing life. We were, however, getting pretty good at anchoring and picking up a mooring in most conditions, and we hardly ever caused any significant damage when docking Nine of Cups. We weren’t afraid of long passages and were starting to explore a little further afield – from Kemah, Texas to maritime Canada, and then all the way back down to, gasp!, the Bahamas. We wanted a better way to document and share our learning experiences and adventures than our written journals, and starting a website seemed like a good idea. Neither of us were strangers to computers, but creating a new website on our own seemed more daunting than an ocean passage.
First, we needed a digital camera. We discovered that Earthlink was giving digital cameras away free as part of a promotion for subscribing to their ISP and email service, and we signed up. It turned out that the camera had only a resolution of around .2 megapixels, not a great camera even in 2002, but it served our purposes well enough at the time.
Very similar to our first Digital Camera
For building our webpages, we used Sitebuilder for our web host. They provided a web-building tool that allowed us to construct each webpage offline on our laptops, then upload the code to our website. I remember paying exorbitant fees to upload even the 64 KB photos our camera was capable of at very slow, pay-by-the-minute internet cafes in sweltering, dusty, remote villages.
Over the next few years, Sitebuilder was sold to one company, then to another. With each new owner, the cost of maintaining the website went up, while the support and software updates decreased. The result was that our website looked more and more dated and didn’t work well with those new inventions like smartphones and tablets. Even worse, the webpages were saved as HTTP files, which were much less secure from malware attacks than the newer HTTPS file format. Consequently, our website visitors started getting messages that warned they were visiting an unsafe, unsecure website. Obviously, we needed to do something.
Ugh! Our old website was Dying
In 2012, after a week-long planning session with our webmistress (and niece), Gentry, we laid out and started our new website, www.JustALittleFurther.com. At the time, we were exploring the east coast of Tasmania. We’d been aboard our sailboat, Nine of Cups, for more than 12 years, and had no plans of giving up our sailing life. Thus, our new website was devoted almost entirely to our sailing lifestyle. Our goal was to share what it’s like to live on a boat, sail around the world, and visit all those amazing ports-of-call, all while keeping Nine of Cups in good shape along the way.
The transition to the new website was daunting. We had to rewrite hundreds of pages from the old website and move them to the new, while posting almost daily blogs and keeping the website continually updated. Not to mention that, while doing all those website tasks, we were also crossing oceans and exploring new places.
The list of old webpages TO BE Converted
In 2018, after 18 wonderful years living aboard Nine of Cups, we decided we’d crossed enough oceans, and made the decision to sell her and move back ashore. We bought a cargo van, upfitted it into a liveaboard camper, and started making long road trips instead of crossing oceans. Then we did it again with a newer van. Along the way, we discovered we also liked to make extended bike trips, using the van as a base. We found a new fondness for long walks as well, including our longest, the Via Francigena, a trek across Europe from Rome to Canterbury, England. All of these adventures were added piecemeal to our website, and as we did, it was becoming more and more disorganized and cluttered.
Over the past year, we’ve been working on reorganizing the new site. At long last, we also finished migrating the last of those hundreds of antiquated webpages from the old Sitebuilder website to www.JustALittleFurther.com.
Our latest update cleaned up several webpages, but the biggest changes were to the Van Life page. It was embarrassingly out of date and rather clutzy, so we completely reorganized it and added lots of new information. It’s not totally up to date – there are still a few projects and roadtrips yet to be documented, but it’s getting there.
It’s hard to believe we’ve been maintaining a website for more than 23 years now – and counting. And we’re kind of proud to announce that between our blogs, website, and YouTube channel, we had more than 24,000 views last month – a little different than when only our mothers were reading our blogs.
If you’re still awake after reading this, thanks! You inspire us to keep writing!
See you next time...