Creating this travel blog
Several of my friends and family have asked how I am doing this travel journal/blog. It's a Mac thing! I used my dot Mac (.Mac) account and Apple’s iLife06 software which added iWeb, a web page authoring program to iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto, and GarageBand, all integrated with each other and ,Mac. IWeb has a blog (daily journal) built in (and I used this Travel Blog as an opportunity to learn this new piece of software).
When I came back on the ship, I upload my pictures into my iPhoto program, which can be seen in iWeb. I just click on "Last Roll" and it shows me the pictures that I just saved into iPhoto. I start a new entry, and pick the picture that I want to use to highlight the day's activities, then I write up my thoughts about the day. When I have Internet access, I upload everything. On the ship, it took about 10 minutes to upload the most recent pages with just a few pictures. I am waiting to upload the rest of our pictures until I get unlimited Internet access (probably a daily rate).
Windows users could do something like it with Front Page if they have web server space available, but there is not the integration with the other tools. Without web server space available, a combination of Blogger (for the journal) and Flickr (for the photos) (http://www.blogger.com and http://www.flickr.com) would work, but both require a lot of Internet connectivity, since these are online tools only (no special software on your computer to use for constructing the site, although Flickr has client software you can download). One option is to do all of your writing with your word processor offline, then cut and paste into the program you are using when you have Internet access. You could also try MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/ ) -- a very popular site with high schoolers. All of these are free services, mostly ad supported, but Blogger (a part of Google) took off its ads over a year ago.
There are other tools out there... these are the most popular. I suppose you could also use MyYahoo, Ophoto or Snapfish to publish photos, but if you also want to keep an online journal, most don’t have that feature integrated into its photo site. There are free sites and there are fee sites... and you usually get what you pay for. I pay $99 a year for my personal .Mac account, which gives me 1 GB on online storage, plus the integration with my other Mac software. There are other ways to get web page storage/publishing, but it costs around $100 a year. Our PowWeb server costs us $94 a year and comes with 12 GB online storage. I'm using the extra space to back up all of my digital pictures, using FTP software.
My Travel Blog
Sunday, May 14, 2006
my iPhoto screen, showing pictures from the Pyramids
