[LINK] Suggestions and advice please

[Stephen Loosley]

Thanks guys and gals very much indeed for your advice regarding an appropriate cloud for a family travel diary.

Here is the original request, and all of your kind advice, listed in order of posting. It's very much appreciated :) 


> Date: Sun, 8 Feb 2015 12:18:02 +1100
> Subject: Suggestions and advice please
>
> Advice and suggestions please?
>
> Soon my retired sister and a friend of hers will be travelling around South America for several months
>
> She has asked for an online place to keep a travel diary with photos so that we family can follow her adventures.
>
> I might suggest Facebook, but I'm not sure all of the family have Facebook pages so some of us could not see her diary. And of course I'm not enamoured with their terms-of-use. But, I'm told their privacy provisions are now good. Maybe I'm paranoid, but it doesn't seem smart to enable the world to see her future travel plans with hotels and times. So, to start, limited access might be good. Besides, we are quite willing to pay for a good cloud system, it need not be free. Ease of use is perhaps one of the most important factors.
>
> So can anyone recommend an online cloud, so my sister can keep in touch with all of us (so with two-way comments) and to record her up-coming travel adventures?  Cheers, Stephen


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Chris writes,

Blogger. 100% recommended for this kind of thing. Great tool for doing exactly what you suggest.

If they want to keep it a bit private they can go to the settings and turn off the options to be listed in the directory and to be indexed by the search engine. This leaves you with a blog that can only be accessed if you know the URL (which would be only the people they allow. 

Of course, they could also make the blog private and only allow it to be seen by specific people, but those people would need Google accounts to be listed as viewers.  The first option I suggested is far simpler.

Blogger is super easy to use, you can even post to it by sending it an email which becomes a post. It can also be customised to give whatever look and feel they want. You can even put it on a custom domain if you wish.

My son documented his recent travels using Blogger (http://www.alexbetcher.com) and I can tell you that it works really well. 

Chris

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Nick writes,

During round the world travelling 2004 to 2006, I used two sites primarily: 

www.offexploring.com for photo storage and a little blogging. This allowed those not on the trip to see what I was up to, where I was, etc. You can see my stuff at www.offexploring.com/largerama

and

http://www.virtualtourist.com/ which is a great site to access communities in faraway places, get first hand knowledge and give first hand knowledge of places, the travelling essentials of places, etc. You really do get the local lowdown from this site. 

Now both of these have moved on I know and maybe they offer some or all of what you want. For instance in 2006, offexploring would resize all images to be much smaller than originals so that is worth thinking about. I dont know if they still do that. I got round that by storing originals somewhere else. virtualtourist didnt have blogging facility as such but may have now. 

Both worth checking out I reckon

Nick 

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Paul writes,

You don't say how she's intending to do this, via a smartphone, or by logging in to internet cafes or libraries.
 
If it's with a smartphone the roaming charges could be a bit rough, if it's by public access point security is a concern.
 
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I like the idea of not travelling with a pile of gadgets.
 
How about making her a Wordpress instance and using that? Takes about five minutes to set up and really easy to use.
 
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Peter writes,

I would suggest Wordpress

Lots of control over content, appearance, layout, huge free widget collection and there are great apps that make posting/editing/managing easy

regards

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Chris writes,

I love WordPress, it's a brilliant platform and I use it for my own blog, but if I was doing a simple travel blog it would be Blogger hands down.

Sent from my Nexus 5

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Peter writes,

I run 4 wordpress blogs, including my travel blog, abandoned blogger for many reasons that made sense to me

explore what is available, I am sure you will find something that you like and suits your pattern of usage

regards

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Richard writes,

Also I think there's a Wordpress plug-in that lets you post via e-mail.

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Jan writes,
 
> Also I think there's a Wordpress plug-in that lets you post via e-mail.
 
That's true. I saw it the other day on my install. It may be a common feature now.
 
Jan

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Cheers everyone, I'll pass your advice on, and sincere thanks once again .. 

Stephen