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Jason Kester


126 Blog Entries
14 Trips
250 Photos

Trips:

Central America
Australia
Africa, 2003
Middle East, 2003
Pre-Thailand Roadtrip
Southeast Asia, the Trans Siberian and Scandenavia
Southeast Asia Again 2006
Surfing Oz in the Hooptie
Southeast Asia, 2000-2001
Building Blogabond
Europe, North Africa 1998
Living in Spain
South!
Morocco for no apparent reason

Shorthand link:

http://blogabond.com/Jason


Hey! I wrote Blogabond so I guess that makes me your host. Welcome!

I spend about 9 months a year on the road, chasing the sun around the world in search of good climbing and surfing. I carry a laptop along with me, and take on small programming contracts to take care of expenses.

The lion's share of Blogabond was written over the winter of 2005/2006 on Tonsai beach in Thailand. I spent the winter there, climbing rocks in the sun for 4 months. Along the way I'd skip the occasional happy hour to implement new features from my bungalow. Since then, about a dozen of our users have made the pilgrimage to Blogabond TransGlobal Headquarters at Andaman B7.

If you're headed out there for the winter, look me up. We'll grab a bucket!


Angkor

Siemreab, Cambodia


Angkor is pretty cool. I'm digging the part where they let you climb over basically anything. The best temples are the broken down ones in the jungle where you can clambor over big piles of stone blocks and drop squeeze into the old Temples that are barely standing.

It was nice that you could hire a guy for $5 to drive you around on a motorbike from Sunrise to sunset and wait outside these temple sites for hours at a time, but still I think my best day was the one where I just rented a bike and pedaled out to the remote spots that nobody visits. Got to meet a couple kids on their way to the fishing hole, and found the back way through the jungle to get from temple to temple.

Too bad they're building giant luxury hotels so fast. In another year or so I bet you'll start seeing ropes and signs and guards all over the place. Better get there now if you still want to sift through the rubble yourself!

permalink written by  Jason Kester on December 8, 2005 from Siemreab, Cambodia
from the travel blog: Southeast Asia Again 2006
tagged Angkor

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By travelers, for travelers

Bangkok, Thailand



"By travelers, for travelers."

You'll find this claim on just about every travel site out there, but if you dig around you'll also probably find a mailing address in Oakland or some other non-exotic location. There's an office there, staffed with anywhere between a half dozen and a few hundred people, most of whom have never been outside the United States. This is not unexpected, since any place that actually hired dirtbag travelers as its staff would have such high turnover that it would never get anything done.

With Blogabond.com, I'm hoping to make that "by travelers" claim a reality. As I write this, I'm sitting at a guesthouse off Khoa San road in Bangkok, nursing a Beer Chang and working out the details on how not to get my laptop stolen when I head out to Cambodia tomorrow. I'll be on the road for the better part of a year this time around, and with luck I'll find enough time to work this site into presentable shape by the time I'm done.

I just pushed a new build live that addresses a few minor bug fixes and finally adds the ability to comment on other people's trip reports. In the next few weeks, you can expect to see enhancements to make the Maps a bit more usable, and a new, more elegant design. So if you're a big fan off grey boxes and photos of cows, best speak up now because they will soon be a thing of the past!


permalink written by  Jason Kester on December 3, 2005 from Bangkok, Thailand
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond

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All good thus far

Bangkok, Thailand


So I'm back in Bangkok, at the tail end of a one-way ticket. Things are essentially going according to plan, with minor exceptions such as the part where EVA Airlines wouldn't let me on the plane until I shelled out $950 for a return ticket. Tomorrow will be day two of the grand "refund the expensive yet worthless return ticket" adventure.

But hey, I got to watch the sun rising over Mt Fuji this morning, and my favorite curry stall is still where I left it. We'll call it good...

permalink written by  Jason Kester on November 30, 2005 from Bangkok, Thailand
from the travel blog: Southeast Asia Again 2006
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More wackiness in the City data

Phoenix, United States


Dubai is not in the database. As in, the capital city of the UAE, probably a city we need. I've noticed a few other standouts that just aren't there in other places too. This is not good.

We're really going to need a way for users to add their own locations to the map. And while we're at it, we should probably add the concept of aliases for places we know about. The town of Abu Zaby shows up right in the center of Dubai if you zoom in on the map. It would be nice if our application knew they were the same place.

But wait, it gets worse! Cairo and Alexandria are missing too. The tiny oasis of Al Qasr is there, but the two largest cities in the country are just plain gone. Not acceptable. We're going to have to find a better dataset.

Oh yeah, I can zoom into my hotel in Cairo and see the name of the neighborhood. But the city is not there. And it claims that Italy, Russia and the Seychelles are in view!

Ah ha! Turns out in my initial import, I neglected to include capital cities!


permalink written by  Jason Kester on October 26, 2005 from Phoenix, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged CertainDeath and Blogabond

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Forums go live

Pasadena, United States


Cranking out features like this and like that! Forums went live today, and they've exploded with a whopping ONE post to date. Yeah! Taking the world by storm!

Photos are also getting easier to manage by the day. With luck, we'll have Tagging in place for photos and comments soon. For now though I'm having to deal with silly things like making the site "search engine friendly", and other minor technical details that keep me away from actually making the site better.

There's also a new design on the way. Sad news I know for those of you in love with grey boxes and oversized fonts. But we live in a visual world, my friends. And looking at the competition it is clear that we simply cannot hang unless we clean the look up a bit.


permalink written by  Jason Kester on October 19, 2005 from Pasadena, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond and Forums

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Are there really Mexican cities in Africa?

Pasadena, United States


We're using a latitude/longitude database put together by the US government. It has over 2 million populated places in it, and for the most part it's fairly accurate. But not always. During testing, I kept seeing cities showing up in places they really didn't belong. And strange things, like Fiji showing up as 'in view' no matter where in the world we were looking.

Digging around in the data, I managed to find a dozen or so mistakes, usually where a longitude of -97.115 would end up as 97.115 or 9.7115. Luckily, most were tiny villages that could simply be plucked off the map and never missed. We also had to deal with countries like Russia, which are far enough North that they actually span most of the globe.

Anyway, most of it is fixed now. Though just yesterday I got an email wondering why 'Centering' on New Zealand would show you a blowup of the Indian Ocean. Slowly, slowly, it's all starting to come together.


permalink written by  Jason Kester on October 18, 2005 from Pasadena, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond

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Usability

Pasadena, United States


Things have been moving fast these last few days. We finally pushed our first build live on Saturday, and have been getting lots of good usability feedback.

Lesson One: Nobody Reads Instructions!
This was our first real mistake. Our screens were easy enough to use, but you really needed to read the little block of text up top to know what you were supposed to do. Even the fact that the "Countries In View" list next to the map could be scrolled off the screen caused a few users to wonder why they couldn't pick Thailand off the list when they were zoomed in on Central America.

Lucky for us, the changes we needed to make were pretty minor. The big explanatory paragraphs are all either gone, or moved down out of the way, in favor of big simple taglines. Gone are the references to Travel Journals, Trip Reports and Diaries. Now it's all Travel Blogs and Blog entries.

Lesson Two: If it looks clickable, it better work!
We have big ideas here. There are plenty of new features on the way, so we mock up all our screens to incorporate those features. The only problem is that users see a link saying "0 photos", and expect to be able to click on it to get to the page where they can view those zero photos. It never would have occurred to me to do that!

So this was another easy fix. We went through and lopped off anything that's not fully built. And in a few cases, we just cranked overnight and made those features work. So now, if you click on something, you can be assured you'll go somewhere.


permalink written by  Jason Kester on October 17, 2005 from Pasadena, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond

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The Flaky VC

Pasadena, United States


So now it's two days later and I'm scanning for consulting gigs on Craigslist in LA. I've been sort of living in Pasadena for a while, trying to get Expat Software ( http://www.expatsoftware.com/ ) to the point where I can skip the country again with a full load of work.

There's an overly enthusiastic ad from a guy wanting to build a MySpace clone, so I send off an overly enthusiastic response asking for more info. It turns out he wants to build a travel site, with maps and itineraries and community spaces and a huge database of everything in the world that a traveler might want to know. It was actually a pretty cool concept, but it had one fatal flaw. It would have taken an army of data-entry monkeys a year to compile enough information on cool places and sights to make it a worthwhile place for a traveler to hang out and do research.

The one thing that I brought away from the 2 weeks of proposal writing to this increasingly flaky prospect was a heads up on the existence of the Google Maps API. Holy Crap! That's Cool! I'm gonna build this guy a couple prototypes!

I ended up writing the seed that would eventually sprout into the Trip Builder. Naturally, the money never showed up and the flaky VC evaporated, but now I was inspired enough to keep going. I figured if the guy ever came back, I'd offer to cut him in on the action (though I'm still convinced there never will be any profit from this thing), and until then I'd just take this on as a hobby, building the site that I wish I'd found back when I was building http://www.jasonkester.com/ .


permalink written by  Jason Kester on July 19, 2005 from Pasadena, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged VentureCapital and Blogabond

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First Inspiration

Portland, United States


I first got the idea to build this thing back in the summer of 2005, sitting in the coffee shop at Powell's books in Portland, thumbing through a Lonely Planet book on travel writing. My dreams of a comfortable life as a traveling author were abruptly dashed, but I came across a term that the author had used that stuck with me. Blog-a-bond.

I downed the rest of my coffee and headed to the nearest Starbucks to register the domain. (Yes, it may sound silly to most of you that I would drink coffee in one coffee shop and use another one only for its wireless internet access. But if you're from Portland, you'll understand. Coffee is important.) Anyway, I had the domain even before I knew what I would build. I figured I'd probably throw up a set of tools that the average Joe could use to build something like I had going at http://www.jasonkester.com/ . Still, I was in no hurry to go ahead with anything. I just liked the name.


permalink written by  Jason Kester on July 17, 2005 from Portland, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Coffee and Blogabond

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Back in civilization

Munich, Germany


So I made it out of Asia, and am safely back on European soil. Things make sense here. People don't follow me down the streets and ask to take pictures. Police don't stop me every block and ask for my papers. Toilets can even flush toilet paper. I'm loving it!

Everybody already knows everything about Europe, so I'll stop recording my progress at this point. I'm already running low on motivation to see any more cathedrals. I'll probably start looking for a flight home before the month is out.

Anybody up for the Silk Roads next year?

permalink written by  Jason Kester on July 1, 2004 from Munich, Germany
from the travel blog: Southeast Asia, the Trans Siberian and Scandenavia
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