I started the web log or Sail Blog or Blog as a method of recording our adventures aboard "Southern Star" and maintain an on-line ship's log. Tim Harincar has provided an excellent platform for this at SailBlogs.Com. The website makes set up and maintenance easy. The interface is also flexible enough that you can do some "fancy stuff" without breaking the system.

The SailBlog page has a link to the user's main or home page, which I did not have, so I set out to create one. The home page is pretty simple. It's mainly a place to start with links to the SailBlog site and to my on-line picture gallery. I had been using Yahoo's photo site as my photo gallery. Yahoo has a great site and it works well in most applications but there were some things I wanted to do that Yahoo won't allow. I searched Google for "photo album software" and discovered Jalbum.com. Jalbum is java based software that allows you to generate your own photo album and publish it to your website. The software is easy to use and fairly flexible. Since I have some web space available from my ISP, I decided to take advantage of the software and the space. The advantage to this "roll your own" photo album is that if a friend wants a copy of the picture in the album, they simply click on the 512 X 512 image. This is a link to the full size photo which can be downloaded like any other picture on the web. This eliminates clogging the email bandwidth with picture files.

I have received a lot of complements on the ship's log and the pictures. I hope to continue writing about boats and sailing and anything else that comes to mind. I want to do a some more pages to add to the home page. Pages about, the boat, the Pamlico Sound, Oriental, etc. I look forward to more adventure and more writing. I may even write about a possible cruise to Bean Town soon.

By the way, the striking sunset picture was taken on the evening after the Great Whortonsville Race, from the deck of Southern Star. I didn't think it would be quite so striking when I took the shot but I think it looks great. I think the quote goes something like...

Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning.
Red sky at night, sailor's delight