About Michael's Travels

In previous decades, I was able to travel on occasion. I have since had kids, and that has reduced the travel somewhat. I had originally created this in Microsoft FrontPage (which isn't even a thing anymore). I had let it sit for a while (more than 10 years) and decided to revisit.

History

Natural Bridge

I work in IT (infrastrucutre), and have always been interested in all things computer related. When I first set the original 'Michael's Travels' up, I knew how to register a domain, and how to publish a website in IIS, but didn't know much about the coding involved with web publishing.


I also happened to be in a position to be able to host the website for free, just needed to register the domain. I have made a few efforts to revisit this in the past, but always ran out of time/interest before I got very far. This time I made it a bit further.










The behind the scenes

Neuschwanstein

The tools used to build and publish this website are free and easy. (Domain registration not included.) The original hosting for this site was free, and free fits my budget.


I used Visual Studio Community to work with a template that I found online: http://www.templatemo.com/tm-413-flip-turn

You can find a lot of good material online, that is free for personal use, as long as you keep the references to the source. If you look at the source code for this page, you will find references to that template. Once you have the template, if you can cut and past, and understand relative paths, it is pretty easy to modify the template to be what you need or want.

Once you have the content, hosting is the next challenge (or maybe a concurrent challenge, since you are likely to want to make updates). I am using Microsoft Azure to host this site. There are two main reasons for that. One reason, for me this is an excuse to explore more of what I do for work in a fun personal way. The second reason, I can host this particular site there for free. I have an Azure subscription already, because I host my DNS there. (DNS is very cheap, but not necessarily free). In this case, I am hosting a 'static website'. The content you see here is static content, nothing fancy, and Azure will host that for free (up to a certain size and traffic load). I will try to write up a entry in my blog and link to that in the near(?) future.