Credits

I am putting these folks at the top of the list The WoodenBoat Forum. I had looked high and low for the meaning of a word. I found examples of its use all over the web, but not one that gave me a definition. It existed in no dictionary. I finally asked these people for help and within an hour I had half a dozen replies, with pictures no less! Morrison misspelled it (no surprise) and others have been doing the same ever since, except for the dictionary people of course. (The word was shieve: A wheel with a grooved rim like the one used in a pulley block to guide the rope or cable.) On this rebuild, they remain at the top of the list, because at the time I was thwarted at every turn by my own ignorance and they lent a friendly hand.

Having said that, the following are in no particular order.

GeoNames has been very helpful in tracking down places with variant spellings and name changes over time.

I have used many dictionary sites, but the most useful has been

More Words has been very useful in helping to puzzle out words where only a few letters were legible.

The Gutenberg Project® is a wonderful site that provides the text for old out-of-print books free of charge, and is the source for Bligh's 'Narrative of a Voyage to the South Sea,' as well as Basil Thomson's 'Voyage of HMS Pandora.' On this site you can also volunteer to do proofreading for the project.

The State Library of New South Wales, New South Wales, Australia, have provided material and help.

As have the Queensland Museum of Brisbane, Australia.

As have the National Library of Australia.

A continuing source of material is The National Archives of the United Kingdom. Finding what you're looking for and getting copies of it is an exercise in frustration, irritation and no end of cussing. But when something comes through, it's a bright sun-shiny day. They have records dating back to the year 600, after all.

I have visited W3 Schools so many times, all I have to do is type 'w' and my browser knows where to go. The site covers all aspects of website building, as long as you don't get too technical.

The folks at HTMLforums.net have been helpful in answering questions I couldn't find the answers to elsewhere. Some sections are better than others.

Google Earth® is the source for most of the map images on this site. Free and commercial versions are available at the link.

However, Google Earth® is not suitable for showing the globe circling voyages involved. After much searching and experimenting, I finally settled on Google Maps API, which allows you to embed Google Maps on your site. Along with the maps API I used the MarkerManager and DragZoom control whose source is available here.

There is a new Google Maps API v3, which I used on Bounty Logbook Remarks with Google Maps. It is supposed to be faster and does not require a key.

Marc Ridey shows you how to do labels for Google Maps API v3 here.

I've been using Google Analytics almost from the beginning. It's free and will provide you with all kinds of information about your website.

Chris Veness's formulas at Movable Type Scripts have been invaluable in teaching me how to juggle latitudes and longitudes.

For editing I used jEdit at I've had this program on my computer for a long time and have used it mainly for Java, C++, etc., but when I ran into a serious problem with arachnophilia, I discovered jEdit with plugins, abbreviations, and macros makes a fine website editor.

Which is still true, but my own program (discussed below) has grown to the point that in addition to everything else it has become a full fledged html editor and I have pretty much abandoned jEdit.

I started out with a timeline courtesy of simile.mit.edu/timeline but had trouble with it that I couldn't fix, so I built my own. The folks at Simile have helped resolve those so I will give it another look, but I kinda like my own.

Before I started this website I was writing an image editing program using Microsoft's Visual C# 2005 Express Edition. So, when I needed a timeline, I added a menu to my image editing program named 'Fateful,' a menu item named 'Build Timeline,' (others followed) and added a method BuildTimeline(). The method has grown to 815 lines but only requires two lines on the web page.* I also added menu items and methods to draw voyage tracks on a large mercator projection map, given a list of latitudes and longitudes. It was fine for showing the long voyages, but it could not be scaled up to show the details, hence Google Maps.

*That timeline has also been scrapped with this rebuild. Having learned more about html and css than I ever wanted to know, the new one is built with said html, css, and javascript. Thus, I got rid of that humongous image, and wound up with something that looks better, and is easier to maintain.

I also used Visual C# 2005 to write a program to help me with the logbook pages, and Visual C# Express 2008 to build another which is a catchall. This latter I just kept adding things to as I needed them. It knows how to search all the pages for various things, people's names, dates, etc., using regular expressions (if you don't know about regular expressions you probably don't want to know) and build csv (comma separated values) files which another part uses to build the search pages. You may have noticed that all the pages have a 'Revised' date on them (they also have a meta tag with the revision date). This program also takes care of that. Most of the ftp client software I tried was just too much trouble, so I built that in too. It's a two-step process, I click on the file, click another button and it loads the file, changes the two dates to today's date, saves it back to disk and uploads it to the website.

In rebuilding the site, I also rebuilt the above program. Before, adding a new page was a headache, especially rebuilding the Find Stuff pages to incorporate the new page. I replaced those .csv files with a data tree (as I write it has 22,683 nodes) and rebuilding the Find Stuff pages is a one click affair.

The data tree has been replaced by several SQLite3 databases.

When I decided to redo the Bounty logbook in complete form I tried programming abbreviations into my program, because the material is so repetitive. Well, it worked but it was a pain because they constantly needed adding to and changing. Then I discovered AutoHotKey which makes the whole business of abbreviations on your computer (and more) much simpler. It is coming in very handy with the Providence logbooks.