Dear travellers, armchair travellers, friluftsmenneske, bushwalkers and others,

Gidday!  God dag!  Jullay!  Namaste!  Bonjour!  etc etc....

After much procrastination, difficulty with emails while travelling, and only a little messing around, I have set up this web site on which to publish some of my photos and words.

Apart from massaging my ego, providing a justification for taking more photographs and giving me a pulpit from which to blog preach, there are several practical and more defensible reasons for setting up a web site:

• Travelling- It should serve as a way of communicating while I am travelling (ie a travel blog)- sending emails has been a source of endless frustration to me on recent trips.
• Living in Norway- I hope to live in Norway for a year in the near future (to learn Norsk, ski and walk, and perhaps do some genealogy), and it will serve as a travel blog during my stay there.
• Genealogy- I have inherited many boxes of information, mostly related to the Gelling family, but also the Ulrichsens and their connections.  When I consolidate my mother's extensive legacy, and I review, scan, photograph and input this material, I hope to be able to use the web site to publish and/or distribute some of it.

You will notice that the site has some built-in e-commerce features.  I won't be using them.  I haven't bothered with search engine optimisation either- the site is just for friends and family (but feel free to forward the link to others).  There is a search function which works well on titles, captions and other text within the site.

The content is quite limited at the moment but I have a lot more to add from many years of outdoor activities.  Initially I am concentrating on publishing material from my recent trips to Norway as only a few people received the emails I sent from there (and I've only put up some content so far).  Among the earlier photographs are thousands of slides which need to be edited and scanned, and I'll try to gradually put some of them on the web site too.  The quality of the content will vary as it comes from a variety of sources- digital SLR and Micro Four Thirds at the upper end, and scanned (old) slides, photos taken with compact digital cameras, and possibly a few scanned (old) prints.  I’ll also add some music to the slide shows.

If you like what you see you can subscribe to the site's RSS feed by clicking on the orange RSS icon () on the blog page.  That should ensure that you get an automated email each time I add a blog post, an event which will be irregular but (I hope) not too infrequent.

A couple of technical points

1. As this is a completely new thing for me there may be bugs or other shortcomings.  If so, please let me know.  The site has been constructed using presets and themes provided by the hosting service (Zenfolio) so don't expect me to do any direct html coding in response to your feedback.  I'm not that much of a geek!
2. I've tested the screen appearance on several different systems, but you may find that you'll need to experiment with your browser's zoom settings or simply scroll down to view everything.  A viewer's hardware, operating system, browser program and browser settings (eg zoom % and menu preferences) all influence how a web page appears.  (An example of this is the welcome message on the home page: there are three quotations, the third being from the Dalai Lama, but not all screens are large enough to show them all.)  Although I've tried to anticipate such differences it seems inevitable that some configurations will not show the pages quite as intended.  In addition it is essential to have a correctly calibrated screen if you want to see the correct colour, brightness and contrast in the photographs.

Happy viewing and reading,

John. On the plateau west of Espedalen and Roasetra.Groomed tracks, a clear cold day and a great ski.