Steve and I came up with this idea for a contest to celebrate the 3 year anniversary of the message board (June 15) and I thought it would be great fun, and not involve much work. Wrong. The prizes have flooded in and I am realizing how much work it will be organizing the judging, doing the judging and making sure the prizes get awarded correctly. Not to mention posting all the wonderful new content that is coming in (that is how people will win prizes).
The best thing about the contest is how prizes are going to be awarded. It is part contest and part raffle. You have to "win" the contest to be part of the raffle. This makes it less competitive and more fun. Plus, when we do the raffle, we give each person a number (as their name is pulled from the hat), and that is the order they select their prizes. So people will get to choose a prize that suits them.
The prizes are excellent. Have a look!!
I lost an entire week to Movable Type, but then was so darned pleased with myself figuring out how it works, redoing all the templates to make the blog pages look like part of Slow Travel. And today they announced that the commercial version of the software for the new release is way more expensive (I paid $150, now it will be more like $500) and you run a limited number of blogs!! I was planning to bring lots of Slow Travelers blogs online!! I guess I will have to go back to Blogger for the majority of blogs. I was in a snit all day today because of this. So are lots of other bloggers.
I am working on Alice's train section. This current bit is fiddly, but will be excellent when I get done. She has written a detailed description for each type of train ticket, making graphics showing each part of the ticket and how to read it. Trains in Italy will be fully documented when we are done, and will no longer be a mystery to anyone.
I have been doing more of my own writing for the site, but need to do more. It feels like I have been working for months on What is Slow Travel? I keep messing with the style sheets, when what I really need is to schedule two weeks to redo the style sheets for the whole site, instead of picking at it one section at a time. I am just getting confused.
I also need to schedule two weeks or maybe a month to convert the whole site from FrontPage to Dreamweaver. The FrontPage extensions have screwed me for the last time - now I am mad!! The classifieds were down for a whole day because FrontPage extensions were reinstalled and the permissions throughout the site got messed up.
We are going to New York City for a big SlowTrav part June 10. All the moderators, except Maureen who will be in Italy and Cristina who lives in Italy, will be there. Three of us will be staying at the same hotel (me, Colleen, Chris). I am pretty excited about this trip. I still have to buy the plane tickets - we are thinking of adding on a few days back east and can't decide where and how long.
And I still have not booked our first week in September for our England trip. If I don't do that soon, it will no longer be possible.
But it is Saturday night and we are watching the first season of Upstairs, Downstairs on DVD!!!
