They say that nothing teaches like failure, so I must be learning a lot.
One of sections that I always wanted on my webpage was an up to date collection of my travel notes and ideas. I tried Google sites for about a year but it was just to much trouble to update on the fly. Then I found Microsoft OneNote and really thought I had a solution. For collecting and organizing information (such as travel ideas) OneNote works great. (I still wish the geniuses at Microsoft would add tabs to Word similar to Excel but that’s a topic for another time.) In short this is the type of project that OneNote was created for. Right up to the point where you want to turn it into a webpage. Microsoft has this bastard child of HTML called a *.mht file. It can be thought of as a zipped set of html files. It only works on Microsoft products and it’s about as bloated as you can get. It also seems to be the only choice when exporting some (OneNote) Microsoft products to a webpage version. Microsoft ignores this because this have the “OneNote Web App”. I say ignore because the app once again only works in IE, and only works if you keep your files on Microsoft Skydrive.
That being said there are a couple of Travel resources I want access to when I’m away, so I guess I’ll have to do this the old fashioned way.
Tim's Travel Map
I wanted a map of National Parks. I figured this would be easy since the Park Service had just such a map but when I got the map it just didn't work for me. Lots of "Parks" in the National Park Service are not wilderness parks but sites. Parks such as Lincoln's birth place or the Carl Sandburg Home. In addition some of the wilderness parks are listed as National Monuments such as the Devils Tower. Finally, some of these parks have nothing there. Fort Raleigh National Historic Site for instance has a small mound of dirt. Nothing to see here folks, please keep moving. So the only option was to create my own map. So I started with a list of every National Park and Monument and then looked up pictures for each and one to see if was worth taking a look at in person. Just a couple hundred parks later and voila. And because I like to ski and visit amusement parks, I made some maps for them as well.
National Parks. Areas in Yellow are the "Top 20" National Parks in the Country.
Ski Areas. #1-#30 are the "Top Resorts" ranked by Ski Magazine. They have separate West Coast and East Coast rankings. The East Coast resorts with a Name,Number are resorts that are driving distance from Raleigh and the number is the number of runs at each resort.
1-21-2014