About this Site

Background:
The Travel Web site was initially created as a gift for Dan Walker's 60th birthday from his family, and will be completed over a period of time, when time permits.

Technical: Where is Dan
Follow Dan across the globe! Using satellites and a Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies, Dan is now able to transmit his coordinates on a daily basis (providing he can find an Internet connection in the country he is in). Dan uses a Garmin eTrex Legend to locate his coordinates. Garmin GPS is shown below:

Technical: Photo Album
The Photos seen in the photoalbum were taken using Dan's new Canon digital camera. Custom software was written to archive (ZIP) the photos into a single file for upload. On the server, custom software extracts the photos from the archive and adds them to a MySQL database. Through administrative Web pages, Dan is able to create/modify photo albums and add comments to the photographs. Most of the server-side software is written in PHP (see below).

Technical: Travel Journals
Throughout his travels, Dan always sends out regular travel journal updates via email to a custom mailing list (consisting of mostly friends and family). A program was written using procmail to receive travel journal updates via email, and automatically add them to Website.

Technical: Maps
All maps were originally generated using the (now defunct) Xerox PARC Map Server. A program was written to automatically request all of the quadrants from the map server, download them and chop it up to be the correct size. The map colourization was a painful manual process. Map layering was done using HTML CSS-P (Layers).

Technical: Website
The entire Website is written using the PHP Web programing language. Backend database is MySql. The server is a RedHat Linux server.

Q & A: Who developed this Website?
All programing and Web design was done by Paul Walker and is hosted on my domain Talisphere.com. I can be emailed at: pwalker@talisphere.com

Q & A: How do I contact Dan Walker?
Dan Walker can be emailed at: wdanielwalker@gmail.com