About this web site
This web site was created to help us inform our friends and families about our current whereabouts and recent activities. Thus our intended audience already knows who we are, and that we are on the whole terrible correspondents. We hope that Innocents Abroad, although admittedly less personal than a handwritten postcard or letter, makes up for this failing of ours by being more informative (and, we hope, entertaining) than any single card, letter, or email could be.
If you somehow stumbled upon our web site and do not know us personally, we offer a warm welcome and suggest that the best way to learn more about us is to read the letters we have posted here and browse our photographs. We hope to post new letters and photos regularly, so come back and visit us often.
That the creation of this website was a learning experience for me is, as they say, a considerable understatement. When I started out, I was pretty sure that something like this was well beyond my abilities. And there were times when indeed it was. But help came in a variety of forms; without it, this web site wouldn’t exist.
First and foremost I must credit the two more-or-less invisible (to you) “engines” that form the backbone of this site. Our letters sections operate via a classy, powerful, and remarkably flexible web publishing system called Movable Type. Our photo albums function by means of a photo display system called Gallery. If you are at all interested in creating a web log of your own, I highly recommend that you look into these two web-based programs.
While you can use both Gallery and Movable Type straight out of the box, if you want to customize either one and link them together, you’ll need to get your hands dirty. Very dirty. In my case, a serious study of CSS (cascading style sheet) formatting was an essential first step. But just one step of many. Mike Pugh graciously shared several of his own Movable Type templates, a generous act which finally pushed me out of a confusing fog of Movable Type generalities into a basic understanding of what makes Movable Type tick. I highly recommend Mike’s web site, vagabonding.com; it is one of a small number of models and inspirations for this web site. My good friend and neighbor Danny Goodman helped kick start my coding efforts, and never failed to get me out of a seemingly insoluble fix (of which there were many). And then there are the patient and truly selfless folks in the Movable Type Support Forums who, for reasons known only to themselves, spend precious hours each day answering pleas for help from hapless souls like me.
Finally, I’d like to thank Mark Twain for thinking up the name for our web site, and all those people who failed to avail themselves of the opportunity to register the name before we did.
If you’re a friend or family member, you already know how to contact us. However, if you’ve lost our email address, or if you don’t know us personally, you can reach us by emailing either John or Robert at innocentsabroad.com. (I’ve written the address in longhand to prevent web bots from acquiring our vital statistics and sending us spam; when you write the address, of course, use the usual format with an @ sign.)