CREATING A BLOG
Last week I started to think about how we would document our trip so that friends and family could stay in touch with us and vice-versa. There are countless sites that offer 'travel journals' or 'travel blogs' online, and upon joining you become a member of their community/archive of travellers and have a very user friendly template to record your trip in.
Personally I prefer to have greater control over the layout and tools I use which is why I have setup a blog. I've used blogger in the past, and currently use it for the Make Travel Fair Blog so it was an obvious choice to use it to record our travels. WordPress is another of the more popular platforms and I had intended giving it a go until I discovered that you cannot edit the standard templates without paying a small fee, and it is only a small fee but enough to send me back to Blogger where I can customise appearances for free.
I used the 'minima' template and just customised a few elements of it. Once the structure is established it is extremely easy to alter the layout using the widget functionality. I found 'Recent Comments' and 'Recent Posts' widgets at Beautiful Beta. An itinerary widget is fed from my 30Boxes Calendar (Google Calendar does not have a decent widget that displays content like I wanted), photos are uploaded and stored in my Picasa Web Albums (I was going to use Flickr but Picasa works just as well and has no limit to the number of albums you can create, Flickr charges an upgrade fee for more than 3/4). A 'Where We've Been' widget makes use of Google's 'My Maps', all in all I guess it is a Google dominated setup, except for the Calendar but it works well, or atleast I hope it will.
Of course there is also Facebook and i'll probably start importing these notes to my profile once we get on the road, but truth be told i'm getting a little bored with the habit and revealing nature of it all. Back to basics for me, where nobody knows and nobody cares. Our new travel blog will be as much a record for us as it will be reading for friends and family.
I'm also using Google Docs to create a Budget Sheet and a repository of info. Creating the budget sheet has not been a happy time.
Personally I prefer to have greater control over the layout and tools I use which is why I have setup a blog. I've used blogger in the past, and currently use it for the Make Travel Fair Blog so it was an obvious choice to use it to record our travels. WordPress is another of the more popular platforms and I had intended giving it a go until I discovered that you cannot edit the standard templates without paying a small fee, and it is only a small fee but enough to send me back to Blogger where I can customise appearances for free.
I used the 'minima' template and just customised a few elements of it. Once the structure is established it is extremely easy to alter the layout using the widget functionality. I found 'Recent Comments' and 'Recent Posts' widgets at Beautiful Beta. An itinerary widget is fed from my 30Boxes Calendar (Google Calendar does not have a decent widget that displays content like I wanted), photos are uploaded and stored in my Picasa Web Albums (I was going to use Flickr but Picasa works just as well and has no limit to the number of albums you can create, Flickr charges an upgrade fee for more than 3/4). A 'Where We've Been' widget makes use of Google's 'My Maps', all in all I guess it is a Google dominated setup, except for the Calendar but it works well, or atleast I hope it will.
Of course there is also Facebook and i'll probably start importing these notes to my profile once we get on the road, but truth be told i'm getting a little bored with the habit and revealing nature of it all. Back to basics for me, where nobody knows and nobody cares. Our new travel blog will be as much a record for us as it will be reading for friends and family.
I'm also using Google Docs to create a Budget Sheet and a repository of info. Creating the budget sheet has not been a happy time.
posted by Steve at
6:55 PM
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