How 'bout that for a left hook! 2 young grizzly bears fighting in a salmon stream. Rarely do real vicious fights break out, but when they, these well-armed opponents can do some serious damage to one another. Grizzy bears, or coastal brown bears (Ursus arctos), playfight in Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Please click the image above t view a larger version of the photo.

Hey Folks,

I’ve finally added some new grizzly bear images to my website – after way too much time. I’ve just added nearly 250 new grizzly bear images from my trips to Katmai in 2009 and 2010. Check them out, starting at row 6, image 09_SEP0345.jpg; some of the images have appeared on the blog in the past, but many of them have not; especially those whose file names start with 10_JUL …  those photos are from this most recent trip.

So, how about this particular photo? We were shooting 2 other bears when I saw this scuffle start to erupt behind us. Time to move and move fast, these little eruptions (usually) don’t last too long. So we shouldered the tripods and heavy gear, and moved quickly through the long marshy grass to be in position to shoot this ‘fight’.

Knowing what might happen is a big help when you’re photographing wild animals. It can make all the difference between being ready for something awesome, and completely missing it. (See my recent blog post on Alaskan Alpine Treks about how often we miss).

We saw these 2 young bears playfight several times during the 2 weeks I was down there.

They weren’t really “hanging” together, but would occasionally cross paths, and after a quick greeting, usually start to wrestle and jostle. I don’t know for sure, but they’re most likely siblings who’ve since gone their separate ways; when they reconnect they wrestle and joust for a bit, nuzzle one another, and move along. Sometimes they’d stay together and head off in tow, though most often they’d go wander off alone.

Thought grizzly bears are considered to be ‘solitary‘ by most researchers, some people don’t look at it that way. Their highly developed communication and sense of social hierarchy could just as clearly indicate that they’re social creatures with a wider sense of personal space than ourselves. Makes perfect sense to me; bears have an incredible sense of smell, for example, and though they may not sit in one another’s pocket, they have a pretty good idea of which bears are where in a radius of up to 1/4mile or more (sometimes) of their vicinity. It would be odd for a social creature with that kind of sense of awareness to have a personal space similar to our own.

Anyway, we moved into position and were shooting these 2 wrestling when the male threw this massive left hook. Fortunately, I had my finger on the trigger, and snagged this moment. I kept shooting and shooting, and didn’t check the viewfinder at all. I had no idea whether I’d caught this left hook or not, though I had seen it through the viewfinder (usually an indication that I had NOT caught it in camera). I was super glad when I finally browsed through the CF cards and saw this shot.

I really would like to thank all the folks who came out this year on our Grizzly Bear Photo Tours; it was a real blast getting to meet and shooting with everyone and always a treat to see Bob again. I’ll give a wider shoutout to everyone in a bit, but for now, this is a big thank you to everyone, and a “Cheers” from Alaska. Thank you.

Also, a big “Thank you” to all the fans of Skolai Image who’ve joined the Skolai Images’ Facebook page. We just hit 1000 ‘likes‘ so far, and that’s awesome. I appreciate it very much. if you have clicked the “Like” button,go ahead and join up. I’ll try to make that page as interesting as I can, and will start adding some more information and tidbits on it soon.

So, if you have a minute, check out the link to my new grizzly bear images; scroll down to Row #6, browse from there, and let me know what you think. I still have more to come yet, but they’re mostly similar compositions or alternatives to add. A few more though, that I’ll add soon enough.

Last, and most importantly, thanks to the grizzly bears. What magnificent creatures they are. Thanks bears!

Cheers

Carl

Caribou herd feeding on the coastal plain, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska. Click the thumbnail for a larger, more epic, version.

Hey Folks

Recently I read a photographer ask the following question:

Now I know that blogging gets your profile closer to the top of the heap and web traffic will probably go up. The question is have any of you actually seen a raise in the amount of sales as a result? Is it all worth the amount of time that it takes to do all this stuff?

Now, I hope the photographer doesn’t mind me mentioning his name, but I only do so because this guy is a total BAD-ASS. Readers, meet Mr Adam Gibbs. Adam is an amazing photographer, and I don’t mean ‘amazing’ like ‘oh yeah, cool’ – I mean like his images are simply gorgeous. If this photo doesn’t make you cry, you’re computer is broke. If this photo doesn’t move you, it’s time for you to retire from your position as CEO of Exxon-Mobil, Mr Tillerson.

Anyway, the discussion that ensued revolved, as suspected, around blogging, facebooking, tweeting, etc, etc. Is it “worth it”?

All these things are just tools – just like Photoshop, or that shiny new Nikon D3s you just bought. And some folks do well with some tools and some folks do well with other tools, and some folks don’t do well at all.

For example – one photographer I know of (who IN MY OPINION could only generously be called a ‘below average’ photographer, and then by his mother) has over 60 000 followers on his Twitter list. Any which way you cut it, that’s a lot of people. If half of them are nothing more than Spam accounts, that still leaves 30 THOUSAND people who get those daily tweets. A ratio of only one in one thousand still could garner 30 sales, for workshops, prints, whatever. That’s 30 more than I’ve made so far today (I’ve had 2 more cups of coffee than I’ve had photo sales today). I would say for that photographer, it’s clearly “worth it” (and maybe I need some more coffee).

Facebook can be useful to help build sales and encourage workshops, but so is attending local camera clubs and doing presentations, talks, etc. Calling photo editors and sending out DVDs to Alamy can help drive stock sales too. Signing on with a stock photo agency can help too. Which tool works best for you is something YOU probably know best about.

At the same time, I think some things becomes a norm, and it’s hard to deny them. Blogs are quickly becoming just that, and it’s probably wise for any photographer to have something in that form. 10 years ago just having a website was the subject .. and many folks had the same discussions we’re having now about blogs and facebooks, etc. These things are fluid and change over time.

Maybe a few years from now Facebook will implode and a new form of spreading the word about how awesome you are will be all the rage. Whether or not that format works for you is really the question.

One or 2 years ago a friend of mine ran a small ad in the back of a major Outdoor photography magazine for his workshops, for 3 consecutive months. It cost $1800, and he made ONE sale, nearly a year later. Was it worth it for him?

To be honest, I kinda feel the question of “is it worth it” is the wrong question. It reduces everything merely to dollars. Sure, we’re in business and that involves in dollars, but it involves many things, particularly when it involves an artform. Perhaps if we we making widgets, that reduction is valid. But as artists, the question ought go further than mere dollars, even as next month’s rent approaches.

Do you enjoy it? Do you want to do it? Those are relevant questions, and for me, the answer is, on the whole, yes, in moderation. I don’t want to be a slave to the process, and I don’t mind slowing down blog posts, or making a few off-the-cuff, nonsensical posts on facebook that aren’t at all intended to generate income; they maybe make a few of my friends grin and think ‘Yep, that’s Carl’. I don’t mind not tweeting all day long, or not posting a Follow Friday list, and that’s fine.

Lastly, remember your blog doesn’t need to be my blog, or anyone else’s blog. you don’t need to post every day because so-and-so does it, nor should you only post once a month because that’s how so-and-so’s sister does it. Your posts don’t need to be  as deep and meaningful as your neighbors, nor they do need to be as random and silly as your teenage niece’s might be. The real beauty of this stuff is that there really are no rules. just like your photography – shoot your passion.

Find what works for you, and enjoy that; for me, that means in about 25 minutes I’ll be skiing. Tweet that.

Cheers

Carl

A winter sunset over the Mentasta Mountains, Wrangell – St. Elias National Park, Alaska.

Hey Folks,

“The effort to clarify our sight cannot begin in the society, but only in the eye and in the mind. It is a spiritual quest, not a political function. We each must confront the world alone and learn to see it for ourselves”. So says Wendell Berry, one of my favorite writers, in his book “The Unforeseen Wilderness”. The book, a dearly needed plea to save Kentucky’s Red River Gorge from a nefarious plan to dam it, was written nearly 40 years ago. I haven’t read the book completely yet, as I just bought it this afternoon. But I glanced at it, and this passage caught my attention. Berry continues on:

“the figure of the photographic artist – not the tourist-photographer who goes to a place, bound by his intentions and preconceptions, to record what has already been recorded and what he therefore expects to find, but the photographer who goes into a place in search of the real news of it”.*

Wendell has long been an advocate for “place”, for living in, and hence coming to know, place. I was interested to read his take on photography and the exploration of place, as I’d written an article that touched on this a while ago. That article can be found here. I found it interesting to see his clear distinction between the ‘tourist-photographer’ and what he essentially is referring to as the ‘artist-photographer’. Wendell Berry describes the journey and experience, and value, of the photographer who becomes the artistic process, and during that experience, explores and comes to know place.

“His search is a pilgrimage, for he goes along ways he does not understand, in search of what he does not expect and cannot anticipate. His work involves a profound humility for he has effaced himself; he has done away with his expectations; he has ceased to make demands upon the place. He keeps only the discipline of his art that informs and sharpens his vision – he keeps, that is, the practice of observation – for before a man can be a seer he must be a looker”. *

When I read this I thought immediately of a favorite photographer of mine, and one of the coolest people I know, Guy Tal. Guy has clearly spent time as a ‘looker’, and is a ‘seer’ of the highest order. It’s Guy’s vision that comes through in his art, as vividly as the landscapes that he so intimately portrays. Guy’s an interesting artist because his technique, while clearly so strong and obviously important, is superfluous when we view the final product; his images reflect ‘the practice of observation’. I’ve had the opportunity to tool around a little with Guy, in the desert near his home in Utah, and treasure those lessons; being around someone who is as sharply attuned to his place is an all too rare treat. Guy sees in a way that few of us are able to, and it comes, in part at least, simply through his ‘profound humility’, to borrow Wendell’s phrase. Guy doesn’t carry his personal stamp, his ID, into the wilderness; he leaves it at home, and opens himself up to the moment – the hallmark of a great artist and an incredibly present person. I’d hate to have to limit my viewing to only 3 of his images, so I won’t; here’s 4:

And I would just see a dead tree

Or a few live trees

Dawn

Spring time.

“Knowing the heaviness of the dead-end search for wealth and ease, what a relief and joy it is to consider the photographer’s pilgrimage to the earth. He is seeking, not the ultimate form of creation, for he cannot hope to find that, but rather creation’s inexhaustible manifestations of form”.* Berry refines his description of this search;

“It is an endless quest, for it is going nowhere in terms of space and time, but only drawing deeper into the presence, into the mystery, of what is underfoot and overhead and all around. Its grace is the grace of knowing that our consciousness and the light are always arriving in the world together”. *

Ultimately, THIS is the beauty of art; the alignment of our selves with the universe. It’s said by some that God made us in His image (of which French writer-philosopher Voltaire so poignantly observed “we have certainly returned the compliment”); God as Creator then suggests that through Art, through our acts of creating, through our own creation, we engage this likeness as fully as we might be able. Art is, as such, not a production, an artifact, but rather it is ‘the transmission of a feeling the artist has experienced’ (Leo Tolstoy). Michel Foucault takes it further, asking the question ‘couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not your life?’ These 2 ideas are congruent, to me, life as art, and art not just as a transmission of our experiences and feelings, but of who we are. The artifact, be it a 16″ x 20″ print, a poem, a clay figurine, or a lamp post, is the product of art – the art is the ‘arriving in the world together’ of our consciousness and the present. Wandering through the desert canyons of the American Southwest with Guy, I became aware that this is how he does his work, observing and studying creation’s endless ‘manifestations of form’.

“In relation to the enclosure we all civilization, these pictures are not ornaments or relics, but windows and doors, enlargements of our living space, entrances into the mysterious world outside the world outside the walls, lessons in what to look for and how to see”. *

And this is what Guy’s photos are; portals into the mysterious, the wonderous, lessons in how to observe. Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote “To wonder is to begin to understand”. This to me suggests that through artists like Guy Tal and Wendell Berry, through their work, their humility, their expression of mystery and wonder we might all come toward greater understanding. So from me, this is just one simple ‘thank you’ to Guy Tal and Wendell Berry, for all that you do, for the gift you bring the world, for the generous and patient lessons you offer us all; you’re good people.

Cheers

Carl

* = excerpts from ‘The Unforeseen Wilderness”, by Wendell Berry.

Hey Folks,

I know a number of the people who visit here have blogs of their own, and most, from what I have seen, also use wordpress as their blogging software. Lately, it seems, some automated spam program has been spamming wordpress blogs with comments that appear like this:

y10vh9u023ozdiy0

or similar. The spam blocker, Akismet, for WordPress doesn’t seem to be too good at picking them up. So what to do?

Here’s a post on the wordpress forums about the issue. I went to this page, and followed the advice Jill gives there, to block the IP addresses listed. Rather than give you the steps to do so here, you’ll get a more complete look at the situation by visiting those 2 pages I linked above.

On a related note, I recently had my site hacked and spammed by some iniquitous villains. The way the spam manifest itself was a bunch of links to all kinds of pharmaceutical drugs and drug companies, insurance companies, and whatnot. The links didn’t show up on the webpages, but would only be noticed if you view the page source/hmtl code for the page. It would always show up at the bottom of the code. I say ‘always’ of course, because it happened more than once. I checked around the web a little more recently, and found a bunch of sites that had been similarly infected. WordPress forums helped out a bit, and I was able to, so far, remove the links and code, and (I THINK) block them from injecting their nastiness onto my epic website any further. Here is the post I made on the forums that helped me out. If you have any similar issues, the info there should help remove the bad code. The main thing, I think, is to upgrade to the newest version of WordPress as soon as possible. It appears, to me, that a problem lies in the code of earlier versions of wordpress, and that allows hackers to get in to your site, inject their code and there’s not much you can do to stop it. I upgraded to the newest version of WordPress and haven’t had another problem so far – knock on wood. I highly recommend if you aren’t up to date that you run over and get your site updated.

One of the problems I ran into with this spam/hacking business (the links on my source code, not the comments I mention at the start of this blog) is that google dropped my blog from their engine. Bad, bad, bad – I went to this page and requested my site be picked up by the Googles again. Fortunately, Matt Cutts loves me, and my site wasn’t banished too long. Some of the pages are still being picked up, but it’s much better now. As long as I don’t get these darn hackers jumping in and messing things up again, all should be OK.

If you haven’t got your wordpress blog up to date, update right away.

Cheers

Carl

PS – yep, that’s me in the pic. Cool, eh?

hey Folks,

So whilst I’m locked down in the dungeon of Anchorage, waiting on the mechanics to tell me my van is fine, and any possible breakdowns were/will be my own doing, I’m dealing with another issue. My backpacking/guiding website, www.alaskanalpinetreks.com was set up, with the help of a friend Bugsy, a fantastic artist from Atlanta (now in LA), years ago, and hosted, at the Bugs’ recommendation, on digitalinet.com. Well, it’s been an adventure, but digitalinet can go to he**.

Their website indicates 24/7 tech support, and toll free phone support. Their website fails to provide any phone # or contact information, other than a standard form to fill out, at all. Not even an email address. I did, via extensive Google searching, extract a few of phone numbers that were supposedly related to digitalinet.com .. 2 of them were no longer working, the other 2 both yielded immediate voice mail messages, and I couldn’t get anyone to return a single call from either of them. I’ve emailed them over 10 times in the last 10 days, and not one of my emails has been returned. Whilst this isn’t the norm, it’s not brand new either. A few of my emails to them over the past 6 months or so were not returned. Generally, though, they did reply, but not always promptly, and very rarely with any courtesy or helpful information.

It’s my own stupid fault for sticking with digitalinet as long as I did – they helped me solve one problem, early on in my tenure with them, with a cgi script – after that, I can’t think of a single issue I had with them where their help actually resolved anything. Generally, their “support” emails might go something like this:

“At this time we do not offer support on ….. You must complete this task via … You should contact someone who can help you. Google “telnet support

Thank you
Digitalinet Customer Service”.

I had email issues with the server a couple o years back, and their reply was:

“We are not having any mail server issues at this time.

Thank You,
Digitalinet Customer Service”

I think the best I can say about their “support” is that they did include “Thank you” in their signature. That was nice of them.

So now that I’ve moved the site from digitalinet.com to a new server, lunarpages.com, I’ve had a major mission of it thanks in no small part to their refusal to offer any support whatsoever. They wouldn’t provide me with any of the database stuff hosted on their server, which meant I couldn’t move stuff like my coppermine gallery and wordpress blogs over to the new server – I had to rebuild them manually, from scratch. The coppermine stuff I’ve done OK with, because it’s a relatively small gallery, but the blog, Ramblings, hosted threads and content that was definitely valuable to visitors to the site. I found, via more google time, some information on how to extract a database from a host via telnet. In doing so, I found out that anyone using telnet these days is not a good host, because it’s not a secure medium for data transfer. Digitalinet.com, of course, use telnet. So, with the help from a local Alaskan web master, I was able to create a dump file, download it, and upload it to the new host, an am in the process of learning how, if possible, to have the blog reflect the data from the old database, and hence, display the content I had previously posted on the blog.

I can’t describe how stark is the difference between the quality of service between, say, the new host, lunarpages, and the old host, digitalinet. Lunarpages have an excellent support team, 24 hour web support and extensive phone support (I might be needing to upgrade my cell phone plan to account for the surge in minutes used), and provide helpful, friendly and courteous service. Similarly, I was able to get very friendly and helpful assistance from the web master here in Alaska, who had no reason to help other than common courtesy when I described the problem to him. Yet I can’t even a reply via email from a company (digitalinet) whom I’ve paid hundreds of dollars to.

Customer Service gets on my nerves like few other issues in business today. We live in a world where if it’s cheaper, it’s better. Economic models be damned, I say – give me a community that nurtures and promotes respect and courtesy. Unfortunately, I think the massive and unrelenting marketing campaigns we’re all so inundated with on a daily basis instead foster a disregard for basic human nature. We’ve come to expect, and expect to tolerate, the kind of ridiculous service we so often in the economic marketplace – all because we’re told it yields a better bottom line. Well, it may take me a while, sometimes, but I’ll bring my bottom line to lunarpages and deal with folks who treat me like they appreciate me dealing with them.

Rather than rag on about digitalinet, I’ll leave it with this. They suck, and I wish them the worst.

Cheers

Carl

PS – this photo is my Aussie friend, Josh Waterson, heading into the first of 5 Class V rapids on the Baker River, Patagonia, Chile, last summer.

Hey Folks

Hey Folks,

So what have I been up to all this time, if I wasn’t pushing my van around Alaska in the winter? Well, I’ve been updating my website/s, giving them some new content and a slight aesthetic overhaul as well. Nothing too major, but learning a few things about design and tweaking some little things. One of things I’ve been working on is integrating a coding technique called “Flash” into the web pages. It’s pretty cool, though I know some web users are averse to Flash stuff.

For all you “non-web-design” people (i.e., my dad) “Flash” is the software used to make these cool little automated slideshows like you’ll see if you check out the home page of this website right now! The home page of course, is here. Looks pretty cool, eh? I did that, all by myself! Also, how about those rounded corners on the table on the left side? Fancy stuff. And I’m not even showing off – yet. I re-did my Recent Work webpage.

I also added a short slide show on my backpacking website, Alaskan Alpine Treks. On that site, I also re-did my Eye of the Beholder webpage, and will be making a few small tweaks on one or 2 other pages soon, too. I hope you like them.

I’m also working on another slideshow, but I’ve got a few things to tweak before it goes public – I’m really excited about putting it on the site, but have to finalise a few details first.

I also added a bunch of new images to this website from this past summer/fall. So how do you find all the new images on my website? Easy, mon frere. Go to this page, type “Carl” in the Search box (sans the brackets), and “60″ in the “Newer than XX Days” box. Presto! You should be taken to a gallery that displays all the images I uploaded to my site in the last 60 days. If you want to just look around, I’ve re-configured the galleries to display images in the order they were added, ,so each gallery will show the most recently added images first, so check them out.

From memory I think I added images to the following Alaska pages:

Denali National Park
Wrangell – St. Elias National Park

And under Adventures there are new images in these galleries:

Camping
Hiking
Kayaking

Under Birds:

Great Gray Owls
Wading Birds

Under Nature:

Bison
Dall Sheep
Elk
Grizzly Bears
Moose

I’ve added a few other images here and there as well, but I think those are the main ones. I’ll have some more images coming online in the next 2 weeks or so, I hope, if I get some old scans worked up. We’ll see if that gets worked into the incipient holiday madness. In the meantime, this stuff should give you plenty to look at.

The photo posted above here was from this past September, when I visited Katmai National Park with my parents. I wish I was smart enough to figure how to do a little slideshow here on the blog, but I fear that’s beyond me for now.

Thanks for your patience while I’ve been offline.

Cheers

Carl

Hey Folks

I’ve been working on some updates on my backpacking website www.alaskanalpinetreks.com, and haven’t really had much time to keep up on the journal lately. I’m also working on something REALLY cool, but I can’t tell you what it is yet. Stay tuned!

So this website stuff can really get a hold of ya. It’s a never-ending process, of updating and teaking and retweaking, and more updating, and then redoing again. And then learning that what you last did doesn’t work, and having to start all over. I need a break for a while. But I also find once I sink my teeth into it, I start to learn more, I start to get better at it, and it becomes easier. Then I take a break, and I forget it all, and have to start all over again. Life was easier as a simple guitar player.

This week I’m finishing up some computer things here, then I head over to the park for some photos. I have no idea how productive it will be, as there really doesn’t seem to have been enough snow yet to make a winter trip, and fall is long gone. But I’m kinda keen to get going and do something other than photo editing and website work. I also want to try out my van on these roads before they get to bad. I have a 2wd van, and I hope it’ll be OK. I guess I won’t really know until I take-off. My plan is to head over towards Slana, on the northside of the park, and tool around there for a few days, and then go down to Chitina, and go in towards McCarthy for a a few days. I’ve got all my winter gear, some new insulated boots, and, of course, my 80gb iPod to listen to along the way.

Once I get back to Anchorage, I’ll have some more website updates to do, and a few other odds and ends. I also hope to get some more writing done this winter, so will try to keep focused on that. In other words, I might not be hitting the Journal every day .. I’ll do what I can though to keep it interesting. Hopefully I won’t lose the 3 readers I’ve cultivated so far (even my parents, God bless ‘em) have turned away.

In the meantime, I have to finish some emails and go to bed. It’s been a long day. It was relatively warm though, nearly 48 degrees today. Looks like winter’s up here aren’t all that bad, the worst of it is over, I’m sure.

This photo is also from my Tebay Lakes trip in Wrangell St. Elias National Park this fall. I’ll be heading back there in 2008, and am keen to explore the area a bit more. The wildflowers in that part of the park are as good as I’ve seen anywhere.

Cheers

Carl

Hey Folks

I’m a Mac user. Tried and true, a bonafide Mac user. As such my efforts at web design are often in vain because of the difference between the Apple and the Windows platforms. Often there’s some discrepancies between how they display certain code. Part of what my recent post about Web Validation had to do with this subject, though it was less specific to the PC/Apple scenario. The Web Validator is basically a way of setting a standard so that browsers and platforms will display coded websites as they’re intended to be displayed. Which is cool. Well, kinda sorta cool – I have some issues with standardised anything, but overall, in this case, it’s probably a good idea.

So, I spent several days working on my site, digging through code looking for attributes and moving bits and pieces of text around to make my site valid code (XHTML, to be exact). I was so proud of myself I even wrote that blog about it. So then, within days, a good friend emails me and comments that the drop down menus aren’t working correctly in Internet Explorer 7.0. I checked them on my Apple, and they worked fine in Safari, in Firefox 2.0, in IE5.5 and in an older version of Netscape. Each browser displayed the menus almost identically. The menus are on pages that are declared valid XHTML code. And yet they don’t display correctly on IE7.0. I then hear they don’t display correctly on some PCs using Firefox (I’m not sure which version of Firefox). So I spend countless hours searching for info on this. I used Dreamweaver, probably the most commonly used and well known web design software out there. I validated the pages with the w3 validator. And yet some platforms and their browsers won’t display a simple drop down menu correctly (or not at all). There should be tons of info on this, right? I mean, surely when IE7.0 or Firefox 2.0 came out, lots of people suddenly had their menus not working correctly? So I dig and dig and find nothing about this so-called “bug”. I email some of my most web-savvy learned friends and ask their opinion. Nothing. I post on the Dreamweaver forum, and most people agree I should just ditch the menus and go with something else for navigation. But not me, I’m stubborn to a fault. Finally a helpful administrator from the forum points to what she sees as possibly a source of the problem. I had indented some of the sub-headings, listed under main headings, using the dash “-”. For some reason IE7.0 would display the dash but not the rest of the text. For example, I would have a menu kind like this:

Adventures
– Hiking photos
– Kayaking photos

etc … and all they could see was:

Adventures
–
–

Somewhat problematic, wouldn’t you agree? So I take the chance on a gamble, and I remove the -. And wouldn’t ya know it, they worked fine. Problem solved.

There you have it. Don’t use a – in your text if you’re using any kind of javascript, because apparently PCs stumble upon such trickery. Apparently someone as ignorant as I am in the ways of web stuff can create valid pages of code, pages that meet web protocols and standards and the folks at Microsoft are unable to.

So now I have to go in and redo all my pages. I’m gunna be busy for a while folks. See ya later.

Cheers

Carl

PS – Oh yeah, the photo. This photo shows the main street of downtown McCarthy, in the heart of Wrangell St. Elias National Park. This is the only gift store in town. In fact, it’s one of about 3 stores in town. Total. How cool is that? More photos of Wrangell St. Elias.

Hey Folks,

I’ve been sitting on this freaking computer nearly all day, dealing with stupid little keyboard characters and symbols to validate my website. What exactly does ‘validate my website’, I know you’re asking. Take a look at Website Validator if you don’t have much to do with your time. If you’re interested in spending days on your own website, for little gain, this is for you. I went through all of the main pages on my Alaskan Alpine Treks website trying to fix stupid little “errors” that apparently needed fixing. Now, my website worked just fine before I did all this. I checked it on various browsers, on various computers and Operating Systems, and it worked just fine. However, the powers that be over at validator.w3 gave me a big thumbs down. My home page, which I still can’t seem to validate correctly, had nearly 40 errors on it. Sounds like a lot, eh? Well, no, it’s not really. Some of my other pages had over 70 errors on them.

What exactly is an ‘error’? Well, I’m sure there are all kinds, but a few of the ones I had to search for and correct were no ‘alt tag’ for an image – even a little image that is 1 pixel wide needs an alt tag. Or I had unclosed

tags, or tags that weren’t needed, or typd “onClick” instead of “onclick” in the javascript codes. Pretty tedious stuff, huh? I thought keywording was a pain. Keywording is a joy compared to this stuff. Compared to spending time on my website searching for little “<" signs and little "#" signs etc, keywording is like sky diving.