blog it or slog it?

Howdy folks! I am looking for practical advice from people who have done a long duration trip and tried to blog it. In the next 2 - 4 months I am packing in the career, possessions, etc and leaving to backpack randomly for an undetermined length of time. While I am out there I figured I might enjoy blogging it up. Specifically, from blogging about my travels I expect to:

1. Enjoy sharing my experiences publicly.
2. Brush off the old writing habits.
3. Feel the rare tinkle of joy that comes from inspiring someone else to travel.
4. Possibly earn some revenue to help me buy beer.
5. Help feed my internet addiction while traveling.

Now my main question is whether I will get a more satisfying experience out of running my own small blog, or trying to find an established travel blog to hitch my wagon to. Off the top of my head, I see the comparison between the two like this:

Small Personal Blog
Con 1. Setup and maintenance.
Con 2. Without traffic the blogging experience can be a bit uninspiring.
Con 3. Likely zero to very little revenue potential.

Pro 1. My creative expression is limited only by my attention span.
Pro 2. In the unlikely event of success, I would have sole revenue.
Pro 3. No content delivery commitments (although with self imposed expectations being what they are you could also call this a con).

Wagon Hitched to Legit Travel Blog
Con 1. Maybe no travel site wants me.
Con 2. Delivery commitments.
Con 3. Potentially low creative expression.
Con 4. Narcissus would disapprove.
Con 5. Likely zero to very little revenue potential.

Pro 1. Established with existing traffic.
Pro 2. No precious lounging time lost to maintenance and setup.
Pro 3. It's fun being part of a larger online community.

Or... maybe my answer is actually a combination of the two? Oh dear. So anyways, that is what I am thinking about today and trying to solve in the next few days. What do you think? What would you do? I would appreciate hearing your opinions and experience. Thank you!




ps: I hate the word "blogger"
pps: I love ordered lists.
ppps: Sometimes just by writing up a post like this you think up new insights.

I'm not an insider to the blogging circles, but am looking at starting a long duration trip next spring or so and am planning on going with my own blog. You've broken down the pros and cons well. Although having not making money as a con for both makes that part a wash. If you were just doing a trip for a set time and wanted to stay it touch with friends and family then using one of the plug and play blogs, such as on BootsnAll or Travelpod would be the way to go.

Many of the Travel Blog sites and even other travelers with their own blogs are looking for guest posts which will be a good way to get your name out there and meet other bloggers who can give you some hints. Its not a quick process to build up your base or start bringing in dough so you need to be willing to do it for the long haul if that's what you want. Since you still have 2-4 months before your trip you'll have to squeeze in setting it up and trying to make it your own (along with all your other trip prep). Once the basics - format, pages, so on - are there updating doesn't seem to be much different if its your own site or a larger one.

Hopefully there will be some other comments, I'm interested as well.

We are leaving on our trip mid-next year and have decided to use a blog to keep in touch with friends and family. I also hope to provide practical information (budgets, logistics, recommendations) to other travelers (I have learned so much from other people's blogs and feel I have a small debt to repay).

I have researched various options, and making money off our blog is not a priority. I have looked at the various canned blog sites (e.g. travelpod), but I don't find them very visually appealing. It seems to me that the most attractive "blogs" are websites created by folks that are computer savvy. Since I am not one of those folks I have decided on the mid-range option of creating my own blog using blogspot. I have found it pretty easy to use, it is customizable, and there are lots of bells and whistles that you can add. PM me if you would like to see our test site (it is not ready for "public" consumption yet).

I have seen some really cool sites made with wordpress, and played around with that for a bit. For me (I am no computer expert), it was a little too complicated and I got frustrated. Who knows, I may play with it a little more and fall in love.

For me, for now, the answer is blogspot.

Oh, and I may try a guest post or two on another site, if I think my posts are good enough.

Cheers!

This is a really great thread. For me, the question isn't whether or not I should set up a blog and where, but a matter of keeping up with it.

I'm quite torn on whether or not I should bring my laptop. I have a 13" Macbook Pro that I just bought in July (before I decided on traveling instead of graduate school). I love it and it's a great tool to have, especially for writing, design and photography, but I'm worried about it getting roughed up, broken or even stolen on my trip.

Obviously if I plan on keeping a serious blog, bringing it along with me would be ideal because it allows me to update more frequently and on my own terms than an Internet cafe or spotty hostel computers would.

I'd be curious to hear how other travel bloggers handle this. Do you bring your laptop with you on your trips or do you rely on cafes? Or maybe you bought a Netbook. What are your thoughts on those guys?

We bought a netbook and will be carrying it with us on our trip. The nice thing is that most travel insurance will cover the replacement cost (e.g. World Nomads covers up $500) if it gets stolen.

I consider having the netbook a good way for us to keep the blog updated. I personally hate sitting in internet cafes, and the netbook will allow us to chill out at night (in the hostel or anywhere else) and work on blog posts. Even if our hostel/guest house doesn't have wifi we can store the post of the text on a thumb drive and post it in a 5 min trip to the nearest net cafe.

I see working on our blog (beer in hand of course) as a great night time activity. We are a married couple so hitting the bars every night is not the focus of our trip, and the more time we can spend during the day seeing sites or chilling on the beach (and not in net cafes) the better.

I always do travel blogs because I like to write, simple as that. My first effort was called The Chocolate Fish and was done while studying abroad in NZ- hosted via Blogger and it was a pretty good format to use. My second blog for my rtw trip, Where is Yvette?, was hosted via Wordpress because I got to the point where I wanted to play around with having extra pages and stuff on the blog and I like the Wordpress look. What I really don't like about Wordpress though is how it seems to keep screwing up my images- uploading is a pain compared to Blogger and lately many people visiting the site have had issues with getting the images to load right and left and I haven't figured out the reason (they're there, I swear, you just need to reload the page).

For all of this work I carried a netbook around with me- EeePC for $400 off of Amazon (even cheaper now), definitely a great investment and I think I might have made a hefty chunk that money back by not having to spend money on wifi while in Europe! Plus it's nice to have someplace to dump and play around with photos or have the ability to watch a movie on long bus rides as an additional bonus.

I just got back from a RTW trip over the past year and blogged on my own site the whole time.

I think there are a couple other pros and cons that you have to take into consideration when you are looking at the possibility of hosting your own site and vying for money on the site - you have to keep up with it!

That could be easier said then done. If the blog is something that you truly want to customize and keep for the long term with possible money-making opportunities then self-hosting (on Wordpress) is the best idea, without a doubt.

On that same line of thought though, keeping up with a blog can be a whole lot of work in areas of the world where internet connections are terrible. Myself and a lot of the other bloggers I read spend hours every week in internet cafes to keep their blog going - time when they could be out exploring - but they love it and it shows in their posts.

If it's just for friends and family though I think that blogspot or something along that line is ideal. You can still customize some - you can still guestpost on other travel blogs and have them point to your site...And the biggie? You can fairly easily export your content if you decide to start your own site in the future!

To build a network within the community and get readers takes a good deal of time - in 2-4 months you can get the site up and really start networking but if you go the self-hosting route you are committing to a good deal of time on your trip as well!

A lap-top is a must if you are going to start a serious travel site. I took my 14 in PC and also took a pac-safe to lock it up. And if it didn't feel safe in the hostel, that meant carrying it around for the day - a small price to pay though since I chose to work from the road. But I always, for the entire trip, had $800 set aside to buy myself a replacement if mine did get stolen

Hope these thoughts help!! Definitely let me know in the future if you go the blog route and I'll help in any way I can

~S

I would recommend a self-hosted wordpress blog. The problem with blogging on someone elses platform is that your blog can go poof at any time and you have no recourse. I've had it happen. My blog from Europe was on Blogger and one day I logged in an entire year of posts were gone.

Also, by hosting your own you can open up the revenue potential somewhat but don't anticipate making much.

You might be surprised about traffic. Google loves wordpress blogs and crawls them regularly so your stuff will show up in the SERPs pretty easily. I have do no promo besides a forum link and the pinging the wordpress automatically does and I get decent traffic - sometimes for random things. My Mexican Food Porn post gets interesting traffic.

Whatever you decide, keep something. I still have a written journal that I kept while I was hiking the Alpine Pass Route and it's great to look back through it. I was lucky that my mom kept the emails that I sent because with my blog gone I have no other record.

Thanks for all the great advice! Between this forum and some chats with an experienced travel blogger, I opted to set up my own little blog. I'll plug away at it, and see how it goes. If you're curious what I am starting with, it's http://www.rerunaround.com

I'm also going to keep my eyes open for guest posting opportunities and the such. Especially once I get on the road in a month or so.

@vagabondette74 I think your point of keeping some form of record for my own purpose really hit home. My memory super sucks. So this blog, plus maybe some extra notes, pics etc will be really important for me.

Thanks folks!

BLOG IT!

NUFF SAID!

Agreed!

BLOG it for sure. It's the best decision I've ever made.

I am an older traveler and I have looked at blogging with Wordpress, Drupal, Gallery2/3, etc and found that I didn't have quite enough time to get all that set up before I left on my recent 7 month trip through Mexico and Central America. I think it is an excellent idea, however and particularly if you are a reasonably good writer and/or photographer. I (like others have recommended) would choose a self-hosted plan with a free blog app and photo hosting app because that is the only way you can feel comfortable about not losing your work and losing control of future format changes or fees. If I went that route I would set up a blog and photo album long before I planned to leave, get it customized to my liking & ensure I was very quick on the draw at updating it. Then I would judge if it seemed like a good fit for me or not, time and function wise.

You might ask yourself, are you just keeping people back home informed or are you trying to put together something that will remain as a mini-novel and/or journal that future readers can come to and enjoy? If the former, a simple shared-use blogging facility will probably do fine because once you are home, chances of anyone looking back may be small enough not to warrant a large effort. If the facility has an email alert system, you will always have your narratives in those, assuming they are not just links back to the blog software and actually contain your narratives.

What I used on my journey was Kodak Gallery before they made changes last year and chopped down the comments portion to unusable as a blogging medium. Previously that platform most matched me with their a mini-text and maxi-photo environment. I believe the answer today, however is moving to a Wordpress & Gallery 2/3 combo if you are into serious journaling and not just family-updates. That's my own plan before I take my next extended journey.

With that said and last year in the previously available environment, I uploaded 6500 photos and average 2-5 line photo narratives during my 7 month journey. I spent an average of 2-3 days of each week in bed with my laptop editing, writing and photoshoping my photos of the previous 4-5 days. So, to do a good job at least in my case with all the photo work and journaling, it took a significant amount of time away from the actual exploring. I looked at it as well deserved "rest days" - you may think differently. I couldn't have personally gone to this level without a laptop. It allowed me to compose my work off hours mostly at night and in a quiet and peaceful environment. I can't even imagine trying to manage a semi-professional blog sitting in an Internet cafe. Too much of a thought-limiting environment and hours that typically stole my valuable daylight! I must also admit that I employed a risky procedure of tipping the local Internet Cafe concierge to allow me to leave my laptop behind their desk uploading photos while I went to lunch almost every day. (Don't forget that many underdeveloped countries don't have what we call broadband at their Internet cafes and it is usually shared by a lot of people as well; not good for photo uploading. Try sharing a DirectWay Satellite link with 23 others, as I did in remote Mexico! )

I do think the Netbook route is an excellent idea. You need to get it customized and feel comfortable with it as well as your blogging software long before you pack. Practice doing everything on it that you now do on your main system, everything, because it will be your sold link back home while on your journey. Don't believe that you will be able to use the air-card outside of the US. Worst case I heard was of a $19,000 phone bill on return to the US. In Central America, all the air-card flat rate plans required an 18 month at around $40 per month commitment, which in all fairness would be well under the $19,000 pay as you go bill one family received. In Mexico/Central America cafes are sometimes reluctant to provide wireless access and finding a free wireless business is not always easy (at least for me); so ensure you have a wired connection available on that Netbook. Also, it might be a good idea to not save passwords to things like your bank account on the Netbook, just type in manually each time. That way if it is stolen, you only lose the laptop.

Make your plan and timeline accordingly. I would imagine my activities somewhat on the extreme side. They are not to suggest anything as appropriate for others but to give you some time requirements for making your own plan. I always added 2 to 5 lines of narrative with each of the 6500 photos during the 7 month period and this is the time it took me. Hope this helps!

A question for those of you that are blogging, what process do you use for putting up photos? Or what would you do now if you were starting a new site? I'm just getting mine site going and want to go with something I won't want to change if at all possible. Right now I'm using the NextGen plugin to display the pictures and uploading directly to my site's address.

Is there an advantage to putting things on Flickr (or similar) and pulling them onto your site from there? I can see where having pictures were on Flickr and having them well tagged could help new people stumble on to it, just not sure if it would be worth the additional effort. Its still early for me so won't be bad to swap things around now.

@Don I agree on the "rest days" being needed. I really enjoy a nice day with no itinerary. And editing up a blog post is a good excuse to drink tea and click the mouse some. It is a vacation after all, right?

@minerguy I use Picasa (google's photo service) for my photos. Both storing my personal collection and also hosting images for my site. It seems there are a handful of reliable choices of sites to use, I just happen to prefer Picasa. The advantage for me is that the photos are easier to manage on a site like that. I can clearly organize them and use them how I see fit with no need to move them around or duplicate them. I put the photo up once and I can send it to a friend, post it on my site, and keep it for my own sanity without having 3 photos floating around out there. I have an efficiency obsession so it drives me nuts to duplicate work. Also as you said, folks can browse your gallery. Say for example you put 2 or 3 pics on your site and link to your album for those who want to see them all. Also, there is the benefit to your hosting package bandwidth. Locally hosted images use up your bandwidth allotment. So being comfy with an image hosting site lets you worry less about that.

We are currently traveling around the world and have a blog (www.theroadforks.com). I started the blog about four months before we left because I wanted to get into the routine of writing and blogging. Now, let it be noted that I love to write. I could wake up every morning of my life and do nothing but write. Both my husband and I love photography - while not professionals by any means, we are pretty serious amateur photographs. And, my husband is a software developer and loves to program.

If not for those three things, I think maintaining our blog while traveling would be absolutely miserable. As Don Juane put it, we spend an inordinate amount of time on our site while traveling. I try to get two posts out per week and spend about 4-5 hours per post (including time spent culling pictures, Photoshopping the pictures I post, writing the post, and organizing everything together in a post). I love doing it because we are creating a virtual scrapbook for ourselves and so many people tell me how much they love our site. RTW2010, we also thought that blogging would be a great night time activity but, often we don't have good internet access in hostels, etc., so we end up needing to work on our site during the day. I think our blog is doing pretty well - we get a good number of hits and all that --- but even still, there are days when I wonder why I am putting all this effort into our blog, especially when dealing with slow internet, or in cool places when I would rather spend time seeing sites. For us, it is because we love writing and photography but if you don't like those things than I think blogging could be very frustrating.

I would not suggest blogging to keep in touch with your family and friends. Very few of our family and friends read our site --- not because they are uninterested but because they aren't in the habit of reading websites. I would say only about 20-25 of our close family and friends regularly keep up with our site. The bulk of our traffic comes from people we don't know or people we have met virtually through social networking sites.

We also use Picasa as our photo management tool and really, really love it. I personally don't like Flickr because it a bit awkward to use. We love the gallery browsing feature in Picasa.