As you all presumably know, I'm leaving shortly for a five week coaster journey across America. Featuring everything from California and Florida, and everything in between, there's a lot to see. I wanted to do something that would allow people to keep up to date on our travels, and see what we can see. Because we're taking a laptop with us (we have a business to run!), I decided that it'd be good fun, and certainly something that's never been done before, to create a site that is essentially a travel blog. After a long time in development, CoasterTrips.com is nearly open. There'll be updates every few days, complete with trip reports, PLENTY of photographs and videos every now and again. It'll come live some time this evening (it's getting there, but still a little buggy and whatnot), as we just perfect some of the coding and design, but it's a very sleek design, and I wish I could take credit for it. I'll still be here in some fairly small form for the next five weeks, but the bulk of my very limited time on the internet will be spent there, so check it out every now and again if you're after some groovy updates.

WOW! That's a fantastic design. Send my congratulations to whoever designed it (Simon?). I'm curious to know how you will do these updates so frequently. Uploading will take quite some time (unless you're somehow getting cable access?). Well done, ~Liam

Dialup access is significantly better in America, and it doesn't hurt that our USA ISP is essentially the same company that house our servers, so we're essentially connecting straight into their network, so there's less hops to get from us to the server. The fact that we'll be uploading simply whole folders of photographs (which are automatically resized to thumbnails, indexed etc.), rather than one by one or any other way, means also that we'll be able to just leave the laptop chugging along. Another thing is some hotels offer free DSL access (with dataport or wireless network access), which makes it slightly less painless.