Starting Tribal Networks Morocco Website

This looks easy so I'll give it a try. It's all good practice, even if no-one reads it!

Last March a couple of us from Tribal Networks, a charity with the aim of providing decent internet access to tribal people in remote areas, went to Morocco to visit a village in the Atlas Mountains. We had already done surveys with Google Earth and NASA elevation data, but wanted to make sure we had line-of-sight connections between the village, a relay and the town of Azilal where the internet connection would have to be.

When we got back we decided we would need a website, and being short on cash after buying land and paying for a school to be built, I would have to do it myself.

Between about 1994 and 2004 I'd done a fair few hand-coded html sites, but then I had got exasperated by the mess of competing 'technologies' which were making it a real pain to do that kind of work. CSS and HTML developments had kept me going for the last two of those years, but the promise wasn't being fulfilled. After a long time of using tables for layout I gave up and pursued more interesting things.

But now it seems all but the same old recidovist are trying hard to embrace open standards, and the old intransigent is getting loads of flak and making noises about becoming compliant. Things look a lot more promising.

So I've armed myself with BBEdit once again, and re-discovered StyleMaster. I'll throw random thoughts and experiences in this blog as it goes along. There's the bones of a site up at http://maroc.tribalnetworks.org/ which is still in progress, not really public yet.