I've spent most of the afternoon and evening getting my butt kicked by Flash CS3 and especially ActionScript 3.0. I'm not really in a great mindset for coding, having not done it in a long, long time, and learning ActionScript pretty much from the ground up is grueling. But I think it will be worth it to do the simple few things I want to do for our greater website.

Basically, I want the website for Changing Gears to provide three functions:

1. Give day-to-day text updates. The extension of this daily blog, although it may eventually not be hosted on blogger, depending on how well I can get the aforementioned flash to integrate with the blogger feed. I want us to be able to type up updates on the road and then have them posted quickly to the website.

2. A daily photo journal. We're going to be taking lots of photos, and a fair amount of video every day. I want to post a small collection on photos on each calendar day during the trip, as well as having screencaps from the day's video.

3. A weekly video segment. The ideal for me is if we can be editing while we tour. That's going to be painful in some ways since I'd love to have the extra time to enjoy the trip. But I also want to turn the project around extremely quickly, and have the benefit of having footage available to post on the website. I'd like to be able to post a weekly video with highlights from the previous 6 days on every weekend. Sundays we are planning to rest from riding, and hopefully the extra downtime on the weekend will allow us to make larger updates like putting a short video online.

So anyway, that's pretty ambitious for someone who doesn't have much of a clue about the new actionscript or the new version of Flash. In about 6 hours today... you can select the month you want to see. Hopefully the date selection will be in place tomorrow....