Step 1: Preparation
Once you have made a confluence visit, you need to have everything ready before
you submit your visit to our website:
- You will need an account on our system. If you do not already have one,
go to our Login page and create one
for yourself.
- You will need the names of any people besides yourself who were with you
on your confluence visit, and, optionally, their email address and homepage URL.
It is best if such people go to the
Login page
themselves, and create their own account, before you start submitting your visit.
The reason for this is that if they already have an account, when you enter their
name(First and Last, the same way they entered them), they will automatically
be added as a visitor, including an internal link to connect their account
with this confluence visit. If they do not have an account, and you enter their
name, an account is created for them, but because they did not create it,
they may not have the ability to access their own account.
- You will need to know how close you were to the confluence, in meters. There are a
number of ways to figure out how close you came to the confluence:
- If you achieved "all zeros"(i.e. the minutes/seconds were zero) on your GPS,
and had the GPS set to use the WGS84 datum, then the distance is zero.
- If you were using a datum other than WGS84(or NAD83, which is almost identical)
you will have to convert the coordinates of your closest approach to coordinates
using the WGS84 datum.
If you recorded a waypoint at your closest approach, the easiest thing to do
is to change your GPS settings to display coordinates using WGS84, and then
display the waypoint. Another option is to use any number of programs that
can do such conversions. A free utility for Windows is
G7ToWin.
- If you had entered a 'confluence waypoint' in your GPS exactly at the WGS84
confluence coordinates, and were using the 'goto' function on your GPS, it may
have reported your distance to the confluence. If you recorded a waypoint at your
closest approach to the confluence, and have a 'confluence waypoint' in the GPS,
your GPS may have the option to tell you the distance between the two waypoints.
One way to do this is to create a 2-waypoint Route, and then the length of
that Route is the distance between the two waypoints.
- You may have coordinate information that isn't in your GPS, such as information
you wrote down while at the confluence, or pictures of your GPS. You can use
any program that supports creating waypoints, such as
G7ToWin to create
a 'WGS84 confluence waypoint' and a 'WGS84 closest approach' waypoint, and find
the distance between them.
- You will need to write your narrative. You should do this before you start
submitting your visit:
- Make sure you understand our Narrative Requirements.
- If you use our website page to type your narrative, and something goes
wrong with your computer, your internet connection, or our website, you may
lose everything you had typed.
- Using your favourite 'word processing' program will be easier for you
than using our webpage.
- We would like you to review your narrative before you submit it to us.
This includes the use of a spell-checker.
- We prefer your narrative be composed of plain text characters. In
particular, if you use a wrod processor such as Microsoft Word, please disable
it's "smart quotes" feature when writing your narrative.
- You should make use of HTML when writing your narrative - in particular,
to indicate paragraphs. For more on this see our
Use of HTML in visit narratives
page.
- You will need digital images of your photos:
- Make sure you understand our
Photo Requirements.
- Decide which photo to use as "the main photo", Photo #1. Decide on the
order you would like to use for the balance of the photos.
- You will need to make sure none of the digital photo image files are too
large - our limit is two megabytes per file.
- Other than to meet our 2MB size limit, do not resize your digital photo
images to make them smaller.
- Make sure your digital photo images meet our minimum size requirements.
- Especially if you scanned your photos to create the digital photo images,
check each image, and if necessary crop any extra margins. You can use the
free image viewer program IrfanView
to view your images, and crop them if necessary. Do not rely on viewing
your images in your web browser, as white margins may not be visibile
against a white background, and if the image is corrupt, it may not be
readily noticable.
- If some of your digital photo images are too dark, use a program such as
IrfanView to try adjusting the "Gamma correction" of the image, which will do
a better job than just adjusting brightness or contrast.
- Have the digital photo image files named such that there are no spaces in
the filenames, and do not use accented characters.
