Travelvice.com

During the winter of 2004 I was fortunate enough to escape from the toil of work and graduate school for a few weeks and travel to Thailand. In an unexpected turn of events, my journey abroad happened to coincide with the devastating tsunami that ravaged dozens of countries and claimed countless lives. As fate would have it, the decision to attend the infamous Full Moon Party—which took place the day of tragedy—on the island of Koh Phangan quite possibly saved my life.

It was at least 36 hours after the tsunami hit before I had the opportunity to use an internet café (at which point I realized the magnitude of the devastation). My e-mail inbox was full of unanswered messages seeking reassurances of my well being. Using an incomplete address book on an underdeveloped (and infrequently used) web-based mail program, I sent out messages to the friends, family, and co-workers for whom I had e-mail addresses available. Weeks later, I found myself reflecting on this event, concluding that there must be a more effective means to communicate en masse.

Travelvice.com was crafted as the solution to the correspondence issues that I experienced while traveling in Thailand. Like other blogs, this site serves as a means by which I can publicly share my thoughts, experiences, feelings, observations, and memories. My desire to share with those whom I care about the most is the principal motivation behind creating and maintaining a Web site such as this—and of course to let people know where I'm at and that I'm still alive.

From domain name brainstorming, to design, to implementation, Travelvice represents hundreds of hours of invested time. A labor of love, it goes without saying that I'm particularly proud of this Web site, and the milestone it represents in my life.

Technical Overview

The following list touches on a few of the technical highlights that you might find of interest:

  • HostGator has been used to host Travelvice since its inception in the spring of 2005 ( view site uptime )
  • Designed and coded by hand from scratch, this site was meticulously built using a tableless presentation methodology, adhering to W3C standards for XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets
  • Journal entries and their comments were once managed using Blogger1, but I've since happily moved on to WordPress (in Feb 2008). Naturally, a healthy amount of imaginative PHP scripting is involved
  • The photo gallery, full of priceless memories, is powered by Gallery 2
  • Journal entries are syndicated in the RSS/Atom format via FeedBurner, and are available at http://feeds.feedburner.com/travelvice ( 0 subscribers )

1 Thankfully, all 2005-Feb 2008 Blogger content was finally migrated off their system in February 2010.