It’s hard to find a good place to begin, but here goes: We are creating this blog as a digital scrapbook of our past and future adventures. We are doing this because we both have been on a lot of great adventures. We have amazing, wonderful, incredible memories of those adventures. However, those memories are starting to blend together. We are starting to forget which photos are from what trip, who we went with, and what exactly we did.
I have been trying to find a suitable medium for preserving these memories for quite some time. What I’ve wanted is a way to incorporate words, pictures, videos, maps, and other things into some sort of document that we can then preserve for the future. For a while, I was planning on doing what our parents did- print out 3″x5″ photos, write a description on the back, and put them into a photo album. I have always loved going through my parents’ and grandparents’ old photo albums. However, I never liked how you always had to either pull the photo out of the sleeve to read the back, or if you only did one photo per slot, flip back and forth to read the photo and its description.
I’ve considered a number of different solutions- a word document, a PDF, a video slideshow, etc. But none of these would work the way I wanted it to- word docs get really slow when you add lots of pictures, PDFs are faster but less easy to manipulate, and a video slideshow would take way too long to put together.
I looked around briefly for some sort of enterprise solution, but:
Another requirement that I had was that whatever I chose, it had to be able to be stored for potentially quite some time- much like a photo album that can sit on the shelf for years and years between readers.
I finally realized that a website could fulfill all those requirements. A website can kind of be whatever you want it to be- provided you know how to code, which I do not. However, I found that a program called WordPress was an incredibly simple way to build a website that would be “good enough” for what I needed. Turns out, something like 42% to 63% of websites are built using WordPress. I suppose I’ve really just “rediscovered” what a blog is, but in hindsight, a blog is the best way of curating, displaying, and preserving memories in our current modern age.
A website meets my requirements perfectly:
A website also meets my final requirement: you can back it up offline and store it however you see fit- on an external hard drive, a home server, or even just on your computer’s desktop. As long as you have the correct software, you can back it up offline and store it for as long as you want.
So that’s it then. We’ll be documenting past and future adventures here, and backing the site up locally in case something happens to the internet. The long term goal of this project is to make these memories available to our children and grandchildren, in much the same way that our parents’ and grandparents’ photo albums are available to us. If you enjoy reading along, great!