A Bit of History
For over 25 years Martin's Trips Programme was despatched every year along with his Christmas cards, following discussion of dates and venues by a core of people on an annual pre-Christmas walk in the Peak District.
Following the advent of the internet, Martin and Sue decided that the Programme could be better maintained by way of a web site, copies of the pages from which could be posted to those without access to the 'web'.
Accordingly, in January 2003, we launched the 'Mountainview Trips' website, using the free web space provided by our email provider. That comprised 7 pages - a Summary page and further pages providing more details about our different categories of trips, (evenings, day walks, holidays, etc). Tagged on to this were a further 20 or so pages designed by Sue, describing the Tour of Mont Blanc walk that we did in 2000. These days those latter pages, virtually unchanged from the first upload, receive a steady flow of visitors from all over the world.
It soon became obvious that it would be a shame to delete all reference to a 'trip' once it had happened, so an Archive page was created as a means of summarising all the trips in chronological order. This page became very long and has now been sub-divided.
And since we were taking photos and writing reports on certain trips, why not publish those as well? So we sometimes do that, an early example being our Welsh 3000's walk in July 2003. Then there were recipes, routes, and other additions, usually just tagged on to the site following requests from third parties.
In 2004 Martin left full time employment. His plan was to 'wind down' doing some part-time accountancy work and, if possible, accompany people on trips that they would pay for, under the 'Topwalks' banner, the name of a web domain he had purchased earlier that year. Whilst Topwalks has traded on a break even basis mainly for friends and relatives, the trips originally envisaged have not got off the ground, largely due to a lack of marketing.
In the summer of 2004 the website proved invaluable for keeping in touch as we spent two months backpacking across the Pyrenees on the HRP (Haute Randonnée Pyrenéenne). We didn't recognise the term at the time, but we 'blogged' our way across using a mobile phone and helpful children back in the UK. Many of our friends followed our progress. Martin used a similar technique on his first TGO Challenge walk across Scotland earlier this year.
All this has resulted in the 'Mountainview' site outgrowing the small amount of web space allowed by our original email provider, which has changed hands several times and now concentrates on the bigger business end of the market. So, given that we were running topwalks.com with just one active page, it made sense to transfer the 'Mountainview Trips' pages to that site, with a link to the commercial element of that site (should anyone ever want to pay us for accompanying them!). [As of November 2007, the bus has been sold as the 'commercial' side of things has never taken off, so the link has been removed.]
So, we have tried to effect that transfer, and you should now go to Topwalks Trips at www.topwalks.com, and not to www.mountainview.u-net.com. We have tried to use a '301 Redirect' to automatically redirect visitors to the mountainview site to the equivalent page on the topwalks site, but that will end early next year when the u-net subscription runs out.
Our email address also changes - to (anything) @topwalks.com.
If anyone techy reads this, we'll be happy to receive any helpful input, and if you spot any obvious flaws please do let us know. In the meantime we will try to use the additional space now available to us to good effect, and add some of those reports, recipes, etc that we have been promising for so long.
Enjoy the outdoors.
Martin and Sue Banfield
October 2007