itsafrogslife.net/goodbook

• Created: 1998
• Type of site: static html

Back in 1997 I took part in the International Camp Staff Programme and ended up on a Boy Scouts of America campsite called Camp Freeland Leslie, situated in Oxford, Wisconsin, and run by Three Fires Council of St Charles, Illinois (the Western suburbs of Chicago). I enjoyed the summer so much I returned the next year (as part of the programme) and the following two years (for two weeks each time, under my own steam). I even took part in the Operation Icicle winter survival camps in 1998 and 2000. But I digress…

The staff on camp used a songbook called The Good Book of Peter Henry, named after a former staffer and compiled by Paul Ivanauski, another former staffer. When I left camp at the end of my first summer I took away a copy of the Good Book on floppy disc. When I got home I edited the book to add page numbers and a contents page. I also formatted the book so that songs didn’t run across two pages, and added some of my own campfire songs along the way.

In 1998 I turned the songbook into a website and published it at homepages.enterprise.net/zaba/goodbook

In 2006 I moved it to itsafrogslife.net/goodbook where it has remained relatively untouched ever since.

The website still generates a regular trickle of emails with queries about songs and requests for a copy of the book. My plan for the future is to re-build the website from scratch on an appropriate WordPress theme that will give each song its own page and make it easy for sound recordings of the songs to be embedded.