So my challenge was how to put together a community website using – ideally – one of the free or very cheap services out there “in the cloud”. It had to look reasonably good, and also include an email infrastructure to help keep the 200+ members in touch.

This article describes the software and services used to create and manage a modern community website,  and the reasons for choosing them. I describe the basic steps to get up and running quickly, including optional links with Twitter and Facebook. There are doubtless a number of alternatives, and I make no claims to my solution being the best or being suited to the needs of everyone. But in explaining the choices made I hope to at least help guide those who want to do something similar.

About www.area14.co.uk

The purpose of the website is mainly to report on the charitable and social activities of the dozen or so individual Round Table clubs that made up Area 14 (i.e. Round Table in the East Midlands). There are also links to various events, and a calendar page that summarised events for the year going on. There was also a large number of photos on the existing site.

This link from the Internet Archive shows a typical news page from way back in 2004.

If I was you I wouldn’t start from here….

The  www.area14.co.uk site I inherited had been set up a few years ago. It was a “traditional” website in that it was entirely authored using Microsoft FrontPage, and generated static html pages that had to be uploaded to the web manually. It was hosted by an ISP as just one of a number of commercial websites that were owned and managed by the originator of the Area 14 website. The hosting also took care of some email redirections so that, for example, an email sent to thesecretary @ area14.co.uk would get redirected to the actual email address of the person who happened to be secretary that year.

The practical implication of this set-up was that an entire copy of the website was stored locally on the webmaster’s PC. Any changes to the site – posting a new news article etc – were done in Frontpage and then uploaded directly from the software using the FTP upload extensions. All updates had to be done from this one PC. Also, the FrontPage software is also an intensely manual website authoring tool, and setting things up like searches or article groupings is not easy.

Photographs were typically just dumped in a “galleries” folder, and then had to be manually linked from a hosting page, resized and generally made more suitable for viewing on the internet. Again, quite a manual, time consuming and error prone process.

On the upside, since the site was hosted as an adjunct to the commercial ventures of one of the members of Round Table  (Blue Bird Sam Ltd), it was all completely free to the organisation.

Requirements

So I sat down and had a think about what I wanted out of a revamped website, and came up with the following list :

1. Use my own URL (domain name), in my case www.area14.co.uk.
2. Not have master content stored on a single home computer.
3. Allow more than one person to write articles and publish them.
4. Require little or no technical knowledge to write and publish articles.
5. Keep latest news items to the fore.
6. Provide a nice browsing and searching mechanism so visitors can easily find news about particular clubs or activities.
7. Easy customisation of the appearance (colours, layout, organisation etc).
8. Manage links to affiliated websites, such as individual clubs, the national website, and special events.
9. Provide a feedback mechanism for people to comment on stories.
10. In addition to news stories, have static pages that are not time-sensitive (e.g. information pages).
11. Manage email lists.
12. Handle upload and display of photos easily.
13. Be straightforward to pass on the job of webmaster when my time is up, and without needing much in the way of training or installation of software.
14. Free or very low cost (in the order of a few pounds per year).

The problem really separates into two parts – the website and email/communications.

The website requirements pretty much match what a good blogging system should be able to do. And so I looked around at blogging options to start with. Email was a bit of an unknown initially, at least as a free service, so I needed to do some research.

This list was just my initial requirements. Later on, once I had a solution in place, other needs surfaced such as a link to Twitter and Facebook. I touch on these briefly towards the end of this article.

The Solution – WordPress and Google Apps

I decided upon WordPress to address all the problems, with the exception of email. WordPress is a blogging system that is very popular worldwide. There are a number of alternative systems such as Blogger which would probably also do the job. To handle the email requirements I settled upon Google Apps, although I did host the email via my own personal website for a few months.

WordPress

From my own personal website – Pushing Pixels that you are reading here – I had some familiarity with the WordPress blogging tool freely available from wordpress.org. It is hosted it on a machine I rent from my own ISP, and I have complete access to the code, database, and configuration. As an open source piece of software it is highly customisable and very powerful. There are hundreds of design templates, widgets, and plugins that give you a lot of things to play with. But to manage it at this level you really need  a reasonable level of technical expertise to be at ease with the system, how to host things, handle updates, and tweak the system to keep it running smoothly. This precluded it being easy to hand over the webmaster job to my successor, and also meant that we would be tied to a more expensive annual website hosting contract.

But there is also a WordPress service - WordPress.com – that  hosts blogs and manages all the technical bits for you.  It is free for up to 5Gb of data – that’s a lot – and pretty modest charges should you need more. You do lose out on the number and choice of widgets and plugins available – you are stuck with what WordPress allows you to use – and the number of themes (designs) is again limited to what WordPress approve. There is still an enormous choice of themes, however, so unless you have quite specific needs you are unlikely to feel too limited on the design front.

One of the benefits of going the hosted WordPress route is that if at any point in the future you decide you want to host it yourself, then you can download all your existing data from WordPress.com to bootstrap your WordPress installation. In addition, a number of other blogging systems can import WordPress data. Between them these two features give you some flexible choices should your needs change.

Creating your own WordPress blog is easy and can be done in literally a few minutes. Just goto WordPress.com, sign up, and register your blog name. WordPress blogs are all named “something.wordpress.com”, where you supply the something, typically the name of your organisation.  The first requirement on my list is satisfied by the WordPress “Domain Mapping” feature so you can get away from the default something.wordpress.com URL to something closer to what you want. In other words, having your URL point at the WordPress servers instead of somewhere else. It is very easy to do, and described in the WordPress help here. In my case I used www.area14.co.uk instead of the default area14.wordpress.com.

There is a small charge for this of $10 per year (US dollars). If ever you want to host this away from WordPress, then you can simply stop the domain mapping.

Choosing a Look

Once you have your website registered the next step is to get it set up ready to go live. Typically this means choosing a theme (what the site looks like), customising any plugins, and optionally setting up some static pages to tell visitors a little about your organisation.

Building a logo in Photoshop

Choosing your theme is very much a matter of taste. One of the nice things about WordPress themes is you can easily try out different ones without messing anything up. For the Round Table website I chose ‘Digg’ – a three column layout so I could have navigation and information panels down both sides, with a central wider column that contains the main content of the website. I also wanted a theme that let me define my own header image to go across the top of the page.

If you do want your own header image then you need to find out the dimensions expected – i.e. the width and height in pixels – which you can get from the theme information. I used Photoshop to knock something up of the right size, and which blends together different subimages – the Round Table logo, the Area 14 logo, and a white background. The screenshot shows how this was built.

Writing a post

Once you have your blog all set up, you’ll want to start writing things to populate it. There are two kinds of things you can write (well, three actually, but I’ll come to that later):

• “Posts” – these are the articles that appear in the central part of the home page of the site. The system automatically displays the newest one first, with earlier posts shown further down. It also automatically organises posts into”Recent Posts”, “Archives” etc.
• “Pages” – These are more general articles that appear along the top tabs and in the “pages” section. Whereas posts are generally date-stamped news items, the content of posts is more factual information about the club that we want to be visible all the time and so is not time-sensitive.

This link on the WordPress FAQ provides a more concise description of posts and pages.

The third item is a “Link”, which provides a way of adding permanent links to the sidebar of the website. You could, for example, link to sponsors and related websites from here.

To create a new post just press the “New Post” link, and you can just type away. For example:

Writing a new post

If you have ever used Word or email, then the user interface for writing stuff is obvious, and I won’t describe it here. You also can upload pictures from the “Add media” button on the Post bar.

The panel on the right of the editing page  provides the commands to preview your post, save a draft and finally to publish it:

When you are finished you just press the Publish button. Then go to the main page (there’s a link “Visit Site” at the top to help), and you’ll see your post at the top.

And that’s pretty much it for the basics of setting up and populating a website. There is much more to WordPress than I have described here: for example, you can edit posts after publishing them, organise with tags and categories, insert pictures and video etc. My advice is to just dive in and explore. Have a look at the widgets available in the Appearance section of the WordPress administrative page: these provide a number of services such as Google Maps, links to Flickr photo galleries.

Email – the Google bit

Google Apps is a free service that has some overlap with WordPress. It lets organisations set up their own websites, complete with hosted email, mailing lists, etc.  While it would have been simpler to just have the one system, the website features of Google Apps just aren’t as nice and easy to use as those of WordPress.

So what do we want out of an email system to support clubs and voluntary organisations? I had a few things on my list:

1. Provide email addresses along the lines of  ”areasecretary@area14.co.uk” – i.e. have email addresses to match your club URL, and a name that matches a position in the club rather than an individual. The point here is that the email addresses remain the same from year to year even though the actual recipient changes. But even better, it means you don’t have to post your private home email addresses onto the internet – always a bad thing to do!
2. Allow such emails to just forward on to the real person, without requiring them to learn how to manage multiple email accounts.
3. Mailgroups to assign a single email address that gets delivered to multiple people. So you may have one group for everyone in the organisation and another for the committee, for example.

The email features of Google Apps ticks all these boxes.

The main problem to be aware of when you have both WordPress and Google Apps is that you need to handle having one domain name (e.g. area14.co.uk)  being split across two destinations: you need to ensure that web traffic gets directed to the WordPress servers, and email gets sent to the Google Apps servers. Normally when you host a domain, both web and email are sent to just one place. Fortunately, the WordPress people thought of this, and provide a facility to make it easy to set up. See the instructions  on WordPress website here.

Signing up for Google Apps is simple. Once you have an account, then you can set up the email accounts and mailing lists via the either the “Manage this Domain” or “Users and Groups” menus. One useful feature of the user interface for setting up mailing lists is that you can just paste a whole block of email addresses to the “Add new members” input panel. The one annoying feature that I hope will get corrected soon is that you cannot search your mailing lists for particular email addresses. This would be useful when having to change emails. The irony of not being able to do such a simple search within a Google owned site is not lost on me!

There is much more to Google Apps than just email hosting, but to date I have not really explored it. For example I think there is scope for using the calendar facilities – currently the way I list upcoming events for the Round Table websites is just to have a page with a list of dates in a table (see example here). And WordPress’s handling of tables is not very good so I end up doing hand-crafted HTML directly. It would be great if I could integrate a proper calendar control with the website, and I think that Google Apps may be worth looking at.

Photos

A slideshow in Flickr

WordPress nicely handles the upload and display of photos and other images to be part of an article. However, its slideshow capabilities are somewhat limited and so in practice it is best suited to a few images to support a written article rather than presenting a whole load of photos at once. If you get to the stage where this limitation affects you, then I recommend you use another free service called Flickr. WordPress provides direct links to Flickr albums and photos, which makes for  a nice integration.

For an example Flickr site, click here to see the one I set up for Round Table Area 14.

Set up an account in the name of your organisation, and you can then upload whole sets of photos at once. You can organise photos into sets, and then post links to a set within your blog post. You can also point Flickr back at WordPress, and so you can write articles directly from Flickr too and the images will be insterted into your post for you.

Extras – Using Twitter and Facebook

Twitter is all the fashion these days. Rather than me describe it in detail I advise you goto twitter.com and dig around a bit there. In a nutshell, it provides a service that lets you broadcast short messages over the internet to anyone who is interested. As such, it is great for little news items, or ways of alerting people of events in real-time.

WordPress has a widget that will display a Twitter feed in the side panel. You just give it the name of your Twitter account, and that’s all you need. When people visit your website, they will see the latest Twitter items displayed on a sidepanel. Have a look at my Area 14 website for an example. This shows feeds from the Area 14 Round Table Twitter feed.

The link with Facebook works the other way around: when you create new posts on your website, Facebook will update your profile so that all your Facebook friends can see it too. You could, however, make it so that more than one person has their profiles updated – there is nothing stopping multiple people from being updated by the same website. This could be quite a good way of publicising your organisation’s activities around a number of social networks.

Miscellaneous Hints and Tips

While writing this I thought of a few tips and guidelines that will hopefully help those setting up and managing community websites.

1. Create login accounts that are related to the name of your organisation, and use passwords that do not bear a relation to any of your normal personal ones. Remember that at some point you could be passing on the management of the website to someone else.
2. You could be looking after between one and four free webservices, each with their own logins and passwords. Write them down somewhere!
3. Resist putting full email addresses in plain text on your website (e.g. someone@yourorganisation.co.uk), as you could open yourself up to email spam attacks. Instead write it as something like ‘someone at yourorganisation.co.uk’ and most people will understand that. (Note that all the email addresses I’ve used in this article are fake).
4. The same applies to phone numbers if they are personal rather than specific to an organisation.
5. Create an “About” page (not a post) on your WordPress site,  and give  summary of what your organisation is all about.
6. When posting photos, try and be critical and only use good ones that actually show something meaningful about the event they were taken at. A few good and carefully chosen photos will have a much bigger impact than tens of poor ones. Consider cropping photos to focus attention on the main subject of the photo.
7. Try and post some news up reasonably frequently – if people see your site changing they are more likely to keep coming back. If you are trying to attract new members then an active website implies an active organisation that people will feel more inclined to join.

Summary

If you have managed to read this far you’ve done well! I’ve tried to cover all the basics, and as result the article is a little long. I have described how to set up an internet presence for little or no money which is well suited to clubs and community organisations. I have also shown how you can separate out your email services from a website, which gives you flexibility and choice. The article has also covered social media websites, and gives a few hints and tips to get you started.

I have set up three websites now using WordPress and Google Apps: Area 14 Round Table, Long Eaton Round Table, and the 15th Long Eaton Sea Scouts. The last of these I set up on behalf of a friend, and although I continue to give help and advice I do not actively administer it or contribute content. It has acted as a test for the “easy to handover” requirement. They do not all use all of the services described, which is a concious choice based on the slightly differing requirements of each organisation.

I would appreciate any feedback if you use the preceeding information for your efforts, or if you have questions on what I have written. Either login and leave a comment, or send me a Tweet @gregwhitfield.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Setting off, 5pm Friday

In this second article on my recent 3 Peaks challenge I describe the hikes themselves and the transits between the mountains. See Part One for a description of the challenge.

My personal times were:

So as you can see I did succeed and completed it – I got to the top of Snowdon in a shade over 23 hours. I was a little disappointed not to get down again within 24 hours, but as you will discover when you read the account of each mountain, I just count myself lucky to have even finished at all, irrespective of times.

Ben Nevis

A small handful of our party set off before 5pm as their personal targets were simply to complete all three climbs and not worry about the time factor. The rest of us set off at five on the dot as seen in the photo at the top – I’m in the green coat on the right of the picture. Yes, the short hairy legs are mine.

Given the amount of training I had done I was a little surprised that after only about 300 metres or so I was at the back of the column. Maybe it was down to being somewhat restricted in the leg-length department. Rather than going hare-arsing after everyone, however, I decided to continue at the pace I had been training at. Sure enough, after a mile where the slope really starts, I was starting to go past my colleagues who had set off so quickly. Early on I delayered too, which helped a lot as you really work up a sweat on the initial climb. By the time I had gone about 3 miles I think I was in the middle of the pack.

I’ve used Path Profiler in Google Maps to give a rough idea as to the slopes on the route walked. Note the distance reported is on the low side as I cut a lot of corners when tracing the route for the profiler. It would be useful if you could pick on a path already in a map rather than having to trace it out again. To make it readable you may have to click on the image.

Some of the guys were quite serious racing snakes. Ian – my brother in law -was planning on running all three peaks, and another three were speed walking up and hoping to jog down.

Originally I was thinking that I could be snapping photos all the time on the walk, but the pressure of racing against the clock, along with not wanting to concede a place in the order we got back to the cars, meant that it was really hard to justify turning the walk into a photography expedition. Even so, I did manage to grab a few pictures.

Looking back down Glen Nevis

Into the cloud

Looking up you can see some figures against the cloud that hung over the peak. I had decided to take my Canon SLR with me in a weatherproof bag (see Snowdon for more info), and so stopping, putting down walking sticks, unpacking the camera, and lining up a shot could take precious time. In hindsight I think I would have been better of with a small pocket camera like my Ixus.

Top of Ben Nevis

After about 3 or 4 miles, the rest of the way was in cloud and so the view was not that great. Eventually after 2hrs 50 mins I got to the top. Here you can see me with some of the guys who got there shortly after I did. It was pretty cold at the top. Apparently earlier on someone – not one of my crowd – had stripped off and danced naked around the top. Mad sod.

Just below the summit was some quite deep snow that you had to go through. I took this picture as I descended.

I think what Ben Nevis did illustrate is that even though you are walking in mid-summer, where the weather is nice and balmy at the bottom, conditions on the mountain can be very different and can change in just a few minutes. You really do need to walk with good kit. Hopefully if you get nice weather you won’t need it, but if you don’t it will save you a load of pain and discomfort.

Ben Nevis descent, 8-15pm

As I got below the snowline, the clouds cleared briefly just enough to see the sun glint off the loch and reveal the rocky ground that we were on. This was taken at 8-15pm.

Finally after another twenty minutes – about a mile – I got below the cloud base as you can see in this next picture.

Ben Nevis descent, just below the clouds

(Note: click on any of these images for a larger version).

By this time I was feeling pretty good. Not tired at all, in the middle of the pack and making good time. About half way down the track becomes quite smooth for a while so I decided to jog that bit. But after a couple of hundred yards I decided to just walk as normal, really thinking that I did not want to risk screwing myself up when I would not be really changing my finish order enough to leap into an earlier car. None of my training had involved running on the mountain, and now did not seem the right time to start!

On the lower part of the mountain there is quite a steep descent down stone steps. It was here that I first started to get twinges in my left knee. By the time I got to the bottom I was in a lot of pain most times I took a step. It slowed me down quite a lot. However, I just gritted my teeth and ignored it until I got to the bottom where took a couple of Ibuprofen, stuck a tubigrip bandage on it, and got myself sorted for the drive.

I had got down in time to be in the third car – the first two with the fast guys had already left. By the time we were ready to go it was gone 10-30pm. This half hour turnaround was really quite slow, and was mainly due to sorting out hot food. It must have seemed a long wait for the first of the guys in my car who had got down at least 20 minutes earlier than I.

Drive to Scafell Pike

On pulling out of the car park at Ben Nevis we discovered a slight problem. Our driver Paul had forgotten the lesson learned only 10 hours before about filling up with fuel when you get the chance, and we only had a partial tank of fuel. The trip computer was saying we had enough for around a hundred miles or so. By this time, there were no garages open in Fort William, and it was touch and go whether it would get us to Glasgow.

So we had to hope the garages marked on Paul’s TomTom Satnav between us and Glasgow would be open at the dead of night. In the meantime, he drove with economy in mind. For us poor passengers it meant no aircon, or any other non-essential gadget. The drive immediately south of Fort William was spooky – the local deer graze right up to the edge of the road and all you see is a glimpse of antler in the headlights as you zoom by. There was a real risk of a collision with these animals.

We passed a garage identified on TomTom, but it was closed. As we got to the Glasgow turn, we were further dismayed to see the road was closed overnight for maintainance. So now we needed to divert via Stirling. At this point Paul certainly started to earn his Prius Eco-Badge, as he made use of every drop of fuel and every slight hill to squeeze every mile we could out of a now dangerously low tank. If we ran out here – in the middle of Scotland at gone midnight – our challenge would be over.

Finally, with the car running on fumes and prayers, we coasted into a service station on the outskirts of Stirling. Phew!

The rest of the drive to Wastwater at the base of Scafell was uneventful after that, and us five walkers managed to get at least a little sleep even if it was fitful. I was sitting in the middle at the back which did allow me to stretch my leg a bit an ease the pain. I was, however, starting to get worried. We arrived at about 4-15am.

Wastwater, base of Scafell

Scafell Pike

We managed to get going in pretty quick time. Just 15 minutes to get parked, changed, watered up, and on our way. Looking up the trail you could make out the torches of a few other walkers who were already going before sunrise.

Here is the path profile for Scafell. See notes on the Ben Nevis one above for more information.

By the time I was half way up I was in real trouble. Despite walking with care and my sticks, every step was agony to my left knee – it felt like swollen ligaments or tendons, rather than muscle pain.  Three of the guys in my car had zoomed on ahead, with a fourth going slowly just ahead of me but gradually pulling away. By this time I was seriously thinking that I may have to give up.

Luckily about this time I spotted our club doctor, Adam, coming back down. Thankfully he was one of the racing snakes in the first car who had got there about an hour before us. I asked if he had anything to ease the pain and, after a series of questions grilling me on my medical history, he pulled out some pills from his bag and issued some dire warnings about how long to leave it before a second dosage. I swallowed the pills, and carried on up. After just a few minutes the edge had come off the pain, and if I took extra care on my foot position on each step the pain was more bearable. I was still moving a bit slowly, but at least I was going.

Myself and team mates at top of Scafell Pike

My fellow passengers were pleasantly surprised to see me at the top – they had only been there a few minutes. I thought I would be a long way behind, but the steep climb of Scafell is a great leveler of pace, I guess. I think that also my fitness may have paid off as, despite the pain of walking, I never felt the need to stop and rest. Score one for my training regime!

The rocky summit of Scafell Pike around 6am.

Anyway, time for a quick photo or two, and then back down. This one was looking from the top towards the recently risen Sun.

I took extra care on the way down as I was mindul that is when the knees can really start to go. Part way down IanD – the first of the guys from the next car behind us – came pounding up the hill and looked to be a man on a mission. I carried on down, the pain getting better and my pace gradually increasing. By this time the first three from my car were out of sight, with the fourth gradually easing ahead of me. About half a mile or so to go I looked behind me to see IanD really going for it on his way back down. He’s a lanky sod, and the length of his legs was a real advantage to him as he caught me up. As he passed me all I could think was “Bastard! That’s my place in the third car gone….”.

Not too long after, I surprised the rest of my car by striding back to base – the drugs had kicked in big time by now. I was fully expecting to have to wait around now for the rest of car four to get down the hill as IanD had passed both me and one other from car three on his mad descent. Much to my surprise, however, he declined swapping cars as the fourth vehicle was our big BA Baracas ‘A-Team’ van and he could stretch out in the back to sleep. Fantastic, I thought.

Little was IanD to know that his decision meant that his attempt on the Three Peaks Challenge was at an end.

Transit from Scafell to Snowdon

We had a pretty quick turnaround at the bottom of Scafell – I was determined to get a shift-on before IanD changed his mind! As we left, Paul our driver made a great decision that probably affected whether any of us would make it up Snowdon in 24 hours. Rather than follow the organiser’s route out of the Lake District that, on the map, looked the shortest, he simply followed the Satnav that took us out a longer way, but on better roads.

The route most of the other cars followed was to go out through Wrynose Pass. While fantastically beautiful, it is on very steep and narrow roads and the ‘A-Team’ van, in particular, later had real trouble negotiating it. The route we followed was the same as the one I used the previous week when I went up Scafell as a practice run, and dropped out through Wasdale, down to Ulpha, and picked up the A595 that eventually gets you back on the M6 near Woodhouse. Definitely the best route.

We had a straightforward trip, although with hitting the road about 9am we started to get the weekend traffic.  As we got near Wales, the weather turned pretty wet, and the outlook was it would get worse. After about four and a half hours we turned into the car park of Pen-y-Pass at around 1-30pm. We knew that the chances of getting up and back by 5pm were pretty much gone, but we should be able to meet the Challenge target of getting to the top within 24 hours.

Mount Snowdon

As we got ready to go, the rain was not too bad. The next photo shows me just changed and within a minute or so from setting off. For the first time on this challenge I put by waterproof trousers on – boy did I need them!

Raring to go up Snowdon

The five of us headed off at 1-45pm. My knee by now was slowing me down a bit from my normal pace, and after about ten minutes myself and another of the guys, George, who was really starting to suffer with his knees decided to go at our own speed and let the other three go ahead.

Our route was the Miner’s track. This starts off flat for a few miles, continues up a reasonable bit of slope, and then hits a very steep climb of over 400 meters elevation. Here is the path profile for Scafell. See notes on the Ben Nevis one above for more information.

Soon after clearing the car park the rain and wind really started in anger. George’s water proof cover for his rucksack was continually blown off, and I was thankful for having good quality outer layers and a hood that kept my thermal hat on.

The point on the Miners Track where you turn a corner onto the last lake to look up at the start of the 500m steep climb was a real decision point. Winds by this time were gusting over 50mph (as we later found out), and rain was continuous. Light was starting to go.  We both decided to just go for it – I was not too worried about getting up, but the descent later in ever worsening conditions was real concern for me as we started the climb.

Partway up we met a couple of the guys from the second car, who warned us that things were getting bad. They later confessed that after seeing the pair of us they were certain we would not make it to the top. Further up the wind was getting stronger. At one point as I was mid-step across a gap a large gust of wind caught me off balance and I was knocked over. Bit of a brown trouser moment, but I was unhurt and after that a bit more careful. The same thing was to happen a couple more times while on the way back down.

On Snowdon ridge. It's a bit wet.

The rubbish conditions mean that my camera was kept in its bag – I was genuinely fearful that even the bag I had would not be sufficient to keep the water out, given the driving rain. Finally, as we got to the main ridge, I decided that I simply had to take a photo and was relieved that it was bone dry. Here’s where the steep part of the climb ends and you start to walk the final ten minutes or so up the ridge to the summit.

I quickly stuffed the camera back into its bag. A couple of minutes later the others from the third car passed us on their way down.  At this point George and I realised that we had not been passed by all the guys from car one. We later found out that they had got a bit lost on the descent due to bad weather and missed where the Miners’s Track splits and so had instead returned via the Pig Track.

George and I trudged on. Finally, at 4-10pm – 23 hours and 10 minutes since the challenge had started – we both reached the top of Snowdon. To mark the occasion, I risked my SLR once more for George to take a photo of me. Things were so bad the autofocus simply could not lock on on. As you can see, I’m still smiling though! This was not a great day to see panoramic vistas across Wales from the country’s highest peak…

There were only a couple other people at the top, which contrasted greatly with the numbers we had seen at the tops of the previous two mountains. After a very short rest, we headed back down again.

If things were bad on the way up, they were simply crap on the way down. Now the time pressure was off, our priority was simply to get down without injury. By now the wind was gusting upto 80mph (according to the BBC later), and the cloud had descended almost to the lake at the base of the steep part of the track. We saw hardly anyone now, and had to be careful with our navigation as you could not rely on seeing where others had gone. The track was mostly unrecognisable from the ascent as more and more streams and little waterfalls transformed the surroundings.

Completion of the steep descent from the ridge to the lake was when we could start to relax. Our knees no longer were so stressed, and the danger of slipping on rocks on a steep slope passed. From here we just plodded along the much flatter part of the track. It seemed to go on forever. With about half a mile to go we saw in the distance  our driver who had set out to try and find us. The rest of the guys in the car had got down a long time ago and they were concerned for our safety, particularly as hardly any other walkers were coming off the mountain by now. Paul decided he was going to walk for a mile or so up the track, and then call for help if there was no sign. Luckily, that was not needed after all. He informed us that the fourth and fifth cars had decided not to even attempt Snowdon because of the atrocious conditions combined with the lateness of the day. This was definitely a wise decision – going up and down again as night fell would not be fun, and for largely inexperienced walkers likely to be dangerous too. See part three for more on the decisions made back at Scafell that contributed to the abandonment of their attempt.

At long last the three of us returned to the car park at 7-30pm. Two of us were wet through, tired, aching, but chuffed to hell we had managed it. After a change into dry clothes, we drove off to the Holiday Inn in Wrexham to meet up for a few well-earned beers with the rest of the team.

Post-challenge refreshments

It’s all over

Well, I did it. Whether anyone reads this far or not, who knows! Hopefully you’ve found it interesting. It was one of the toughest things I’ve done for a long time. But good preparation, training and kit improved my chances and kept me injury free. The super-strength pain killers I was prescribed on the way up Scafell almost certainly made the difference between success and painful failure. While not making my knee normal, sufficient edge was taken off what was agony so that I could carry on.

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This is the first of two articles on the challenge, describing what it is and how we went about it. Part Two will go into the experience itself.

So what exactly is the 3 Peaks Challenge?

View from Whernside

Rather confusingly, there are at least two of them. Firstly there’s the Yorkshire 3 Peaks challenge, which is a single walk covering the three highest peaks in the Yorkshire Dales – Whernside (728m), Ingleborough (723m), and Pen-y-Ghent (691m) – over 12 hours covering a distance of 25 miles. That’s not the one I did, although I did do Whernside last year – there are a couple of photos from that walk on this site that I use for the random header image (e.g. the Ribblesdale viaduct).

So the challenge I attempted is the National 3 Peaks Challenge, which as mentioned earlier covers the three highest peaks in mainland UK within a 24 hour period. One of the things that makes it tough is the distance between each one: 260 miles from Ben Nevis to Scafell, and a further 200 miles from there to Snowdon in Wales. And that’s on top of the travelling to the Highlands of Scotland just to make the start line. There is some debate as to whether the 24 hour target is from base of Ben Nevis to the return to the base of Snowdon, or whether it is base to peak. The club decided to choose the latter, although I was hoping to do the first target too. The bravado of assuming it will be easy and you will hit your target before you even attempt the first one was put in to stark relief when, after going up Ben Nevis you pretty quickly change your aspiration to just finishing and time be damned.

I created a Google Map of the challenge, which you can find by clicking this link. This shows the walking routes we took. I left off the road routes as it generates too much data for Google Maps to handle properly on a single map.

How we did it

Pretty much the whole of Long Eaton Roundtable membership participated in one way or another, as this was our major charity fund raising activity for the year. After a few last minute drop-outs we ended up with twenty of us doing the walking, and another five doing the driving. A tip to anyone attempting this challenge – try as hard as you can to get a dedicated driver. It makes a huge difference to the enjoyment of the event but more importantly vastly increases your chances of survival! Driving such long distances after strenuous walk and with no sleep for a couple of days could put you up for a Darwin Award!

Our sponsored support vehicle. Cracking stickers!

We had five vehicles, four of which were normal people-carriers. The fifth was a van that looked like the A-Team used it – lots of space to haul gear, and an uncomfortable bench seat for three in the back. Guess which one I was in for the long drive to Fort William….

Our vehicles - 'A-Team' van on the right

The idea was that everyone would set off walking at the same time, which we set as 5pm on the Friday afternoon. While the walkers yomped up and down, the drivers would prepare food, grab some kip, and have everything ready to give a quick feed to the returning walkers before hitting the road.  Each vehicle would set off when full, so the faster guys would not be slowed down waiting for the slower ones to return. For such a large group of walkers this worked well, apart from a slight misjudgement at the end which I’ll come to later (in Part Two).

Food at each base camp was pretty basic – soup and pasta, plus an enormous number of energy grain bars. The drivers also mixed up large quantities of Rego, which is an energy and restorative drink that was recommended by various people. Personally, I tried the Rego once, and decided that was enough so I stuck with water and Lucozade Sports as my main drinks.

A key factor in succeeding to do all three peaks in the 24 hour period is the amount of time spent at the bottom of the first two peaks getting sorted for the journey to the next. Faffing around here can easily cost you valuable travelling time that you can’t get back. So on getting down you had to change, sort your feet out, get some food and drink inside you, and get as much preparation done as possible so you can pretty much hop out of the car and start walking straight away. In theory our use of five separate vehicles should have made this much easier.

The overall plan for the weekend was:

1. Travel up on Friday from Long Eaton (Nottinghamshire) to Fort William, a total drive of around 400 miles. Some of us chose to drive up to about half way and stop in a hotel near Penrith on Thursday evening. The others got up at the crack of dawn and joined us mid-morning. We then travelled up in convoy from there.
2. Arrive in Fort William mid-afternoon.
3. After a supply stop in Fort William, get to trailhead for Ben Nevis sometime after 4pm.
4. Start walking at 5pm, which marked the start of the 24 hour period.
5. Drive through the night to Scafell, aiming to start walking it around dawn on Saturday.
6. Get to Snowdon early afternoon, aiming to reach the peak before 5pm.
7. All off to a hotel in Wrexham for a clean, a meal, and a few beers.
8. Home again on Sunday.

As you can see in the next photo, we had a slight logistical problem with one of the vehicles, whose driver assumed filling stations were as dense on the ground as they are in more populated parts of the country.

Oops.

See Part Two for the story of the hikes and transits between mountains.

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It’s finally happened – I have at last changed my faithful petrol engined Lexus IS200 to a diesel Honda Civic.

And it sounds like a tractor.

I’ve had the Lexus for 4 years now and it has been a genuinely great car – never missed a beat in 60k miles, looks the biz:

It also drives like a dream. Six speed gearbox on a straight six cylinder engine, rear wheel drive, and all the gadgets in the cabin. Here’s another view after a bit of photoshopping (hey, I’ve got to bring photography in here somewhere!).

So why get rid? It comes down to running costs. The IS200 is not exactly known for it’s frugal use of petrol – you do well to get 30mpg out of it. I’m doing 90 miles per day with about 2/3 of those being on the motorway. It was also knocking on a bit, and would probably start to need things like new tires, exhaust, and more frequent service intervals.

So, I’ve been sensible and switched to a diesel. In choosing the new Honda Civic ES 2.2 CTDi I went for practicality in a Battlestar Galactica wrapper. All it’s missing now is Number Six draped over the bonnet…

Only had it a couple of days, but I’m averaging 50mpg to and from work.

Truth be told, it is not as nice to drive as the Lexus. The seating position is hard to get used to – or maybe it’s just my dodgy leg. But the damn thing flies when you stick your foot down – it’s actually quicker than the Lexus. It also looks great, and has a good equipment level. If I could just transplant my Lexus seat and the six CD autochanger to this car…

But changing cars is always an excuse to get the camera out – firstly to take snaps of the old one, and secondly to record what the new car looks like when it is clean. Most of the pictures here are straight snaps, and not very interesting. The two exceptions are the black & white background image of the Lexus, and the background-blurred Civic.

The first of these was done by simply masking out the car in Photoshop Elements, taking care to keep the straight-through windows unmasked. And then a saturation adjustment layer took the colour out of the unmasked area. It’s not brilliant – I was just playing with technique rather than spending time getting the mask pixel-perfect.

The blur on the Civic is a simple trick. First separate the car into a new layer. Then apply a radius-blur filter to the background, and then blend in the car again. I’ve probably not softened the mask enough on the roof, and so that looks a bit poor. Originally I had a crystaline pattern to break up the number plate, but this looked very odd with the blur and so I replaced it with a low noise fill. Still could do with some work on that area though.

The image showing the rear view of the Civic has suffered aliasing problems on scaling the picture for the web. It’s not a very well balanced picture either in terms of both composition and light levels.

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The use of 2D views to aid interaction and visualisation within 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments

When I started it I was a partner in a new tech startup called RealiMation Ltd, and doing a research degree into some aspect of collaborative virtual reality was a natural extension to my work. But shortly after I started, RealiMation was acquired by Criterion Software, and a few years later by Electronic Arts, which in combination provided a radical – yet enjoyable – change in life. But I persevered, and finally manage to submit my thesis seven years after I started. Apparently this is not the record, however, which was somewhat disappointing!

At the time of writing I have no idea if I have passed, but that’s almost beside the point. I could so easily have given up, but stuck at it and produced a decent piece of work in the end.

Just for interest, here’s the abstract:

The goal of this thesis is to present research into technology to support the production of events created within three dimensional computer generated collaborative virtual environments (CVE’s). The demands of the roles of different participants, and the tasks they perform, are examined in a variety of different application areas including command and control, multiplayer networked games, and the broadcast of televised events performed within a virtual space.

Published research into subjectivity tends to concentrate on subjective filtering mechanisms for 3D perspective views, normally from the first person view point. The focus of the research presented here, however, is the feasibility of utilizing parallel map-centric projections within a CVE application as a type of subjective view to be used alongside the perspective view.

The experimental phase of the research resulted in the conclusion that some type of overview visualisation is needed to help users understand what is going on within a CVE. An additional finding was the need to be able to add extra annotation information only within the overview, which in turn implies subjective layering features so that such annotation only appears in views used by the management roles, and not by the regular participants themselves.

The conclusions are combined with a set of observations from other related application areas to present a set of requirements for CVE software systems. The requirements relate to the awareness of activity within the performance, and of interactive navigation tools to allow this information to be exploited. Details are given of an implementation of these requirements for the MASSIVE-3 collaborative virtual environment. Key features of the implementation such as the object model are discussed as having potential to be extracted and used in other CVE frameworks. Areas for future research based upon the experience of this software are outlined.

The body of the thesis is now in review and pending a vivre – unless of course it is rejected out of hand as a pile of old junk.

One interesting thing to point out is that the practical part of the research work that I did in support of a live event called Avatar Farm was referred to and discussed in at least two publications. One was an article in the Communications of the ACM (July 2001), and another was a paper as part of an Esprit project.

Update: November 2007 – I got news that I have been awarded my Masters (an MPhil) based on this thesis. So not a pile of junk after all then!