Monday, June 16, 2008

havet.dk - a charter ship's homepage as blog

My sister and brother-in-law own and sail a brigantine for a living. The ship is called Havet - "The Sea" in Danish. I am their web master and I think it is a thrill to operate one of the coolest Danish domain names: havet.dk.

We had been talking for years about a major update of the old site. The old site was done in Frontpage the old-fashioned way: Table-based and not standards-compliant. I had been thinking about a new, XHTML/CSS-based design. Then a couple of weeks ago it struck me that it just had to be a blog. I decided to use the most recent version of Wordpress. It turned out that their webhosting solution didn't include PHP/MySQL so we had to upgrade. When the upgrade came through, the rest was a breeze.

I have done a little bit of customization to the template I've used. I think it was clever to add a category called 'skibslog' (the ship's log) and put a link to all entries in that category on the navigation bar. Now I can follow my sister and brother-in-law anywhere they go on Havet - and so can you, of course. In the second half of July, Havet and a motley crew of friends participate in the Danish tall ship race Fyn Rundt. I'll be on board with my son Oskar and some of our photographs will appear on the blog. I've also put some of my pictures from last year's Fyn Rundt online.