General Information

The colors used will make more sense if you create and download the KML files on the home page. On the individual park pages, the park name is in the color of the region used in the National Parks Passport. You can see these colors on the map on both the "Groups/Trips" page and the "Parks" page. The color of the information on the right side of the park page is based on the arbitrary color I assigned to that group. If you open the "Groups" KLM file in Google Earth Pro, you will see that all parks which are in the same group are in the same color.

There are a few intents with the Travel Blog. First, I want to be able to write as much (or as little) about the various parks I visit. I want to be able to do it the very evening after visiting the park. A blog lets me do this easily without having to write HTML on a permanent page. The blog lets me write about more than just parks, such as overall trip impressions as I think of them. Finally (or at least "Next"), the blog allows comments from people reading the website, giving a chance for feedback and for others to perhaps give their thoughts on a park. The blog software makes all of this easy.

There are a couple of reasons for this. A park detail page for a park that I have not yet visited will have a default photo from the Park Service.

However, once I visit a site, I mark it in the database as visited with a date and comment. That changes the program logic to show a photo that I took at the park. However, I usually don't get all photos edited and uploaded until after a trip, so if there are no photos of the park available, the code defaults to the New River photo.

Similarly, on some other pages (such as the Groups or Trips page) that expect to draw a photo from that parks in that group, the New River photo will act as a default for groups until I actually take that trip and upload photos.

I used basic LAMP technologies. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.

The hosting service I use runs Debian Linux with Apache as the HTTP server.

I created a database using MySQL which holds all of the park and planning information.

The web pages themselves are all rendered via PHP programs that access the database and build pages dynamically.

There are 20 official designations, listed on this National Park Service webpage. Each designation on that page, if clicked, will show all of the parks with that designation. Sort of.

In reality, there are 45 unique designations (by my count) by which the parks are known. For example, under the official designation "National Rivers" are "National River". "National Scenic Riverway" and "National River and Recreation Area", but not "National Scenic River", which is under the lengthy "National Wild and Scenic Rivers and Riverways" Designation. Go figure!