Website, blog for your trip diaries

[Kainas]

Years ago I planned to upload our both mine and my husband's trip journals, photos, even food lists to a little journal. I designed the website (using my bare bones HTML/CSS skills) and was in the midst of getting it working when I fell pregnant and have never got back to it.

The one thing I decided early on was that a bog-standard blog would not cut it.

Does anyone have any recommendations. I am currently looking at a couple of dedicate travel websites, but I had always envisioned my only personal page on my own URL.

Any thoughts?

[DanShell]

When you say a bog standard blog won't cut it, what are you referring too? What won't it do that you want to do?

Some of the 'wordpress' style programs are really versatile if you think outside the box so to speak. We just use googles, blogger for ease of use but even that is very easy to make it do so much more than just blog.

[bmak]

Get a domain name, hosting and install wordpress.

You can do anything with a wordpress install so it doesn't have to look like other blogs.

I have about 30 wordpress sites that range from plain blogs to photo galleries

[DarrenM]

A simple blog works for me, and although I'm a little fussy on certain aspects of the (Blogger) layouts offered, I found it simple and effective enough for my needs. There are some quirks that I find annoying but deal with them.

By the time I had considered Wordpress, it was probably too late. I didn't really have the patience to switch over from Blogger. Whatever offers you the most creative control would be the right move IMO. Standard blogging platforms may not offer you that IMO.

[Kainas]

Thanks, sorry I realise I didn't add much detail to my post.

I have a domain name (wcthompson.net) which we currently only use as an email address, my host provides unlimited storage and a lot of great tools, including wordpress. I don't know why, but I feel daunted by it. I shouldn't because I have reasonably good web design skills (I used to teach it at a high school level).

I do use blogger a fair bit for personal no-one-reads-this blogging, I occasionally dabble in the site layout, it is good enough for blogs.

I guess I wanted a presentation format that was less blog/journal centered, and instead was more focus on the trip/tracks themselves. As you said, I could manipulate blogger to do this, run the entries as a blog and then use some pages to create a table-of-contents style format.

I think I might bite the bullet and familiarise myself with wordpress.... I have always wanted to have a personal website with boring stuff that only I care about (family history, trip journals, recipe collections), perhaps it is time to do it.

[DanShell]

I think I might bite the bullet and familiarise myself with wordpress.... I have always wanted to have a personal website with boring stuff that only I care about (family history, trip journals, recipe collections), perhaps it is time to do it.

Thats pretty much what we use ours for as well, its more personal past time rather than something we are doing for others, although of course family and friends may enjoy reading it.

You will find that there is a massive amount of add ons etc for word press and you will be able to present it in a manner I am sure you will be happy with. Its quite easy to use as well once you start messing around with it.

[icefest]

If you do get a decent set-up Kainas, how difficult would it be to duplicate for use by another person?

I've been contemplating making something, but haven't made time.

[Travis22]

I'm in the same boat Icefest. I've always wanted to setup my own blog for myself but wouldn't know where to start. As it stands I've got countless trip reports spread over all manor of forums, thousands of pics on Flickr (pro account, which I now hate and basically never use any more since they revised their program) and now pics directly uploaded on forums.

If anyone has seen a really easy to follow guide to setup a blog/ world press thing I'd greatly appreciate it. (I believe my ISP service has massive provisions to host stuff or whatever you call it but again I wouldn't know where to start).

Travis.

[Kainas]

Firstly, happy to help anyone a bit... and feel free to offer to pay me to set one up for you!

This is the set-up that I decided on. http://www.wcthompson.net/journal/ (I am still working on adding pages and going back through old photos and walks, so the australian bit is very unfinished but the rest is about what I am trying to achieve).

1. I have my own URL.
2. I use dreamhost.com (I have done for years), they are reasonably priced, have unlimited storage, and they have a lot of one-click software installs, such as wordpress (so 2 clicks of a button and I have a wordpress site installed on my own URL - that was the easy bit).
3. Modifying Wordpress to suit your own purposes is a bit more tricky BUT a lot easier than doing it from scratch with HTML/CSS (in fact I designed the layout of this site 5 years ago and spent a month working on getting the code almost correct, but there was a lot of fiddling. I achieved pretty much the same layout in a day of work with wordpress). It does require a working knowledge of how CSS controls a webpage if you want to do anything more then basic modifications to the site.

Wordpress is a blog, but it is very very simple to make it behave like an ordinary website, giving you the best of both worlds.

My system is to upload journals to a particular day (which I think keeps it organised). So technically you could just read through the blog section of the site. But then I relegate the blog to the backend and use custom pages on the front. So for example: For my NZ trip I have a parent page "NZ 2008" and that links to three pages "Routeburn 2008", "Kepler 2008", and "Hollyford 2008", and then each page links to the relevant daily journal entries. This has allowed me to upload the daily entries, and then (in theory for the future) return at a later date and pull them together into a nice easy-to-navigate front-end.

I am not happy with a few aspects (ie the add-ons that control the photos are not as good as I want so I am looking for a better one), but largely it is perfect.

Please, feel free to ask questions and I will do my best to answer them and help you understand everything about it.
PS. Happy to do a bit of a "how to build a webpage for your trips" tutorial if there is an interest.

[Kainas]

How difficult would it be to duplicate for use by another person?

The easy answer is that it is reasonably simple, but would still require:-
1-3 days work for the initial setup (including setting up URLs, installing software, customising themes, designing page layouts, designing site layout).
1-2 hours work per journal entry ( uploading images, importing and formatting text, processing video, organising links for ease of navigation) + whatever time it takes to edit the images.
2-3 hours work per page entry (writing text, organising pictures, maps etc).

Plus a lot of time waiting for uploads (ie youtube for your videos).

[DanShell]

For those of you that just want to make a simple easy to use blog for free then give www.blogger.com a go. Thats what we use for ours. Wordpress is my program choice for making custom websites but google blogger is my choice for ease of use in blogging.
Its free to set up and no ongoing costs unless you want your own domain name and even then its only $20 a year.

[icefest]

Thanks for the advice guys.

I'll probably wait until my big exams are over at the end of the year before trying this - it sounds like it'll take several days to get something I'll be happy with.

[Kainas]

For those of you that just want to make a simple easy to use blog for free then give http://www.blogger.com a go. Thats what we use for ours. Wordpress is my program choice for making custom websites but google blogger is my choice for ease of use in blogging.
Its free to set up and no ongoing costs unless you want your own domain name and even then its only $20 a year.

I have to say, I really like the layout of your page, I find it superior in many ways to the layout I designed, and yet there is no way I would be content uploading content in that way (That part of the brain that likes things in nice compartmentalised areas)

Blogger is good and it is simple. I got frustrated with the lack of ability to make it look the way I wanted (ie drew the layout and functionality I wanted on paper first). It is unimportant really, but then I found it worth the effort because it is very nice looking at the website that I envisioned that does all of the things I wanted and nothing of the things that I didn't want - but is it really worth the time is the big question.

The difference is about whether you are wanting a simple online trip journal (blogger.com) or a fully-customised webpage (wordpress) both with pros and cons.

[DanShell]

For those of you that just want to make a simple easy to use blog for free then give http://www.blogger.com a go. Thats what we use for ours. Wordpress is my program choice for making custom websites but google blogger is my choice for ease of use in blogging.
Its free to set up and no ongoing costs unless you want your own domain name and even then its only $20 a year.

I have to say, I really like the layout of your page, I find it superior in many ways to the layout I designed, and yet there is no way I would be content uploading content in that way (That part of the brain that likes things in nice compartmentalised areas)

Blogger is good and it is simple. I got frustrated with the lack of ability to make it look the way I wanted (ie drew the layout and functionality I wanted on paper first). It is unimportant really, but then I found it worth the effort because it is very nice looking at the website that I envisioned that does all of the things I wanted and nothing of the things that I didn't want - but is it really worth the time is the big question.

The difference is about whether you are wanting a simple online trip journal (blogger.com) or a fully-customised webpage (wordpress) both with pros and cons.

Thanks, blogger is quite custimisable if your prepared to put in the time but mostly the supplied templates and built in variants are what the majority of people would find adequate.
I like Wordpress because there is such a large 3rd party library to pretty much allow you to turn it into anything quite easily. It's just a bit of a pain for the average person to setup on a server and get started where as blogger very much simplifies that process albeit being limited in its usability.

[Champion_Munch]

Thought I might add another tick in the blogger box - very easy to set up and customise...and you can still fiddle with the HTML and CSS to fix any quirks you don't much like. Once you've got a template you like, it's pretty much just a matter of adding your photos and trip reports when you have time.