My wife and I just drove 12,000 miles through 30 states and parts
of Canada over 11 weeks. It was exhilarating, but sometimes lonely--staying in
touch with friends and family during an extended road trip can be tough. At the
end of a long day, you don't want to write out a half dozen postcards. But with
a little help from the Web, you don't have to: That's the beauty of a photo
blog.
You create a Web site and simply update it when you get a chance, uploading a few new photos and writing a couple of paragraphs to let everyone know where you are and how you're doing. It's simple, and it's often fast (depending on your connection on the road), and as a result your loved ones become a part of your trip.
Pluses and Minuses
We used Yahoo GeoCities for our site. Although I've been a consumer tech writer since the last century, my HTML expertise never reached the "mad skills" level. GeoCities offers a variety of templates (including photo templates) where you can pop in a photo or eight, type up captions, and have a new page ready to go in 10 minutes or so.
We paid the $5 a month to eliminate ads from our site, as well as to increase the storage to 25MB and push up the bandwidth to way more than the amount casual use would ever reach. Take a look at our site yourself.
Our family at home, and friends from coast to coast, were able to check in on our progress.
"We loved keeping track of your trip and experiencing all the places you went--especially if we had been there, so we could see if you 'found' the same places we did," says Todd Schulte, a friend from Lafayette, California.
The biggest detriment to a photo blog is that it can be a one-way street. We put links to our e-mail addresses on the site so that folks could give us feedback and stay in touch, but we were out of the loop on most of their lives for close to three months.
You also need to be aware that once you have a site up and send out a link, anyone could end up looking at it. My mom especially liked to pass the link along to her friends and other relatives. You're probably going to end up sharing your site with folks you don't know, so keep that in mind as you choose photos and add commentary.
Blogging Options
Yahoo GeoCities isn't the only option. I have distant relatives, Dennis and Patsy Gudgell, who are in the midst of an adventure that dwarfs our travels. They recently drove 18,600 miles across Australia and are currently sailing the South Pacific for ten years with intermittent breaks. They use Yahoo for forwarding pictures, but have had trouble maintaining an account.
"The downside is that if a Yahoo account isn't used once in 30 days, the site is closed down with an additional 30 days before it goes away for good," Patsy says. "As some of our friends enjoy sending pictures to us, I do try and activate it at least once every other month, but finding Internet access out in these coral islands is a major setback. How do you ask a lady who wears only a grass skirt where the closest Internet cafe is?"
They stay in touch with SailMail, a low-bandwidth e-mail service for boaters, and then send discs with pictures back home to be uploaded to the photo-sharing site ImageEvent. ImageEvent is free for a 21-day trial period; after that, it's a reasonable $25 yearly.
Another option is Fotopages, a free site that lets you blog with pictures. You can easily add new images by sending them in an e-mail. A friend living in Korea, John Rupprecht, uses it to share his pictures with those of us back in the States.
"I like the interface, and I've never been bothered by their advertising. They seem to try to market based on information on your page or your links," he says. "They've really got an international scope, which makes it really interesting. I've wasted hours just wandering from page to page."
Photo blogging takes a bit more effort and bandwidth than traditional text blogs. But since it does have that 1:1000 ratio of picture to words going for it, a photo blog can really bring your trip to life for friends and family checking your site and tracking your progress.
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