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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!


New Look

Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France


So, as you may or may not have noticed, we've got a new look for the site. It's a bit more rounded and less cluttered, but still as cow-filled as ever. Mostly, I've gotten rid of a bunch of things that are just taking up space, and moved them off to separate pages where they are still just as useful. They're just not in your face all the time anymore.

This redesign has been a long time coming, as the old look was not pretty by any standard. I actually paid real money to three separate designers to come up with logo ideas and concepts for a new site look-and-feel. What I got back were a dozen flashy designs with lots of blue chrome and pictures of happy couples walking on white sand beaches. Had I been trying to sell electronics or package vacations in The Bahamas, we'd be on to something here. But for a site targeted at dirtbag backpackers writing reports from an internet cafe in Kampala, they didn't really fly.

In the end, my buddy Ben drew a rounded box on his Mac and put the word Blogabond above it. Looks good enough to me. Let's ship it! Besides, the Web 2.0 crowd will love it. Rounded corners, Tags, Clouds, even a Google Maps Mashup in there. Top it off by putting the word "beta" in the logo, and next thing you know I'll be speaking at some conference about the future of the internet.

Anyway, Hope you like the new look!


permalink written by  Jason Kester on July 8, 2006 from Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond, Web20, Tags, Mashup and Beta

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You all can say you knew me when…

Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France



I'm going to be a Millionaire. Check it out, the numbers speak for themselves. Up above, you'll see the results of our first week's advertising revenue (highlighted in yellow), along with an extrapolation showing our growth through the end of the month (assuming the current trend continues.)

So, if you happen to know any venture capitalists looking to get in on the Next Big Thing, you should send them this way. We're heading for glory!


permalink written by  Jason Kester on June 9, 2006 from Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond and MoneyMoneyMoney

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Connectivity at last!

Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France


The Internet has not yet made it to England.

This is what I've discovered over the last month, trying in vain to find a place to plug in my laptop around Kendal, a pretty big town up in the Lakes. Unlike any remote corner of Vietnam, where you'll find three internet cafes in a little village with no tourism, mighty first world England has virtually no place to plug in. You can find a smoky pub with wi-fi, but try to connect to it and you'll hit the hopelessly broken signup mechanism that shells you out to an ISP to purchase time online, then blocks the page where you'd give your credit card details. Not that I'm all that excited to spend £60 for a month of access in the first place, but the process of doing so should not be this painful.

But now, things are looking up. I'm in Chamonix now, kicking it at a giant ski chalet, gearing up for a couple months of client work. With luck, maybe I'll have a few hours here and there to play around on Blogabond. But for the most part, I'll be heads down alongside the rest of the Expat Software team, building The Next Big Thing for our client.

I'm liking the idea of offshore development with a strong team imported from back home. We've done collaborative things remotely in the past, with good results, but this is the first time we've tried to bring the entire team onsite. Even the client is coming out for the duration of the project, so we'll eliminate the communication gap that often slows down remote development. It's also cool that we're halfway around the world from the distractions that usually get in the way of productivity. With the whole team snowed into the chalet, there's nothing to do but crank out code. It should be good.


permalink written by  Jason Kester on June 3, 2006 from Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond and ExpatSoftware

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Photos

Kendal, United Kingdom


I've been thinking a lot about photos recently because, frankly, it's not that easy to upload and manipulate photos on Blogabond right now. It's certainly doable, and not much of a chore if you just want to upload and tag a half dozen shots for a Blog entry. But, as users have been mentioning with increasing frequency lately, it's really time consuming to dump all 500 shots from your memory card onto the site.

That, in my mind, is a good thing.

While it's true that we offer unlimited photo storage for free, we do so with the Hope that our users will limit themselves to only posting the best photos that they have, and the ones that best compliment the journal entries that they write. The theory is that since it takes a bit of time to get a photo up and viewable, our users will be a bit more selective with the pictures they choose to share. At least, more so than they might be if we made it easy to dump the 4GB memory card from a digital camera straight onto the site.

At the end of the day, there are plenty of good sites on the web that offer free photo storage. And realistically, anybody using Blogabond.com simply as a place to store and view their photos would probably better served moving over to Flickr. I think of Blogabond as something like a cocktail party. Just a bunch of friends sitting around, telling their travel stories and showing off some cool photos. The last thing you really want at a party like that is somebody setting up the slide projector and running through all 4000 photos of his trip to Peru. It's all about selectivity, and I think that making it just a little bit difficult to set up that projector might turn out to be a good thing.

permalink written by  Jason Kester on May 16, 2006 from Kendal, United Kingdom
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond and Photos

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Non-Stop

Aberdyfi, United Kingdom


According to the rulebook, every travel blog needs at least one Travel Horror Story, so here's a quick rundown of our return flight to England.

Well, first off, we didn't actually have tickets to England. Just a return flight from Melbourne to Bangkok via Singapore. So that's 11 hours plus 7 hours for those of you keeping score. Once in BKK, we cleared customs with all our gear and a surfboard, and proceeded to try to book the rest of our trip home. According to every travel agent we'd talked to in Australia, "There is no such thing as standby anymore." "You need to have a confirmed reservation from a travel agent to board a flight." That's not actually the case, but good on ya, travel agents, for trying to sell us a full-fare last minute ticket!

We ended up with a sketchy, over-padded, wait-listed itinerary onward to Birmingham, with nothing more than a handwritten credit card receipt in Thai Baht to keep us from being booted onto the street in Amsterdam. I guess the nice thing about post 9/11 travel is that if you somehow manage to get a standby ticket, you'll be the only one on the waiting list. The desk in Amsterdam had no idea what to do with us, so they just stuck on a plane and had us stand around until a couple seats freed up.

So, add in another two flights at 14 hours and 2 hours, followed by another customs line with a surfboard and a 4 hour drive to Wales. That leaves us awake for a little over two days altogether, which may not be a record or anything, but it's not bad considering that this blog is supposed to be about writing software.


permalink written by  Jason Kester on May 1, 2006 from Aberdyfi, United Kingdom
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Flight and Blogabond

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The Australian Mobile Office

Noosa Heads, Australia


Believe it or not, if you spend enough time sipping Mai Tais on a tropical beach, you will eventually get bored of it. After 4 months in Thailand, I was ready for a change. How about a last minute, 60 day return ticket to Australia? I hear they've got surf there.

So, with the promise of another couple weeks client work (for real money), I booked a crazy plush holiday flat in Noosa Heads for myself and the lovely miss Helen. Bought some surfboards, wrote some code, surfed a bunch, lived large. Bought a cheap van off an English chick, threw a bit more money at it so that it might actually run, and headed South in search of right point breaks and wireless hotspots named Linksys and Default.

A few new features kept creeping into the site. Somewhere along the way, Tags were born, browsing and search were improved, and the map stopped zooming out to see the entire planet just because you started your trip halfway around the world from where you were actually writing reports. Internet access is actually hard to come across in Australia, so updates would pile up for a while before being thrown live with crossed fingers.

Once we made it to Sydney, the surfboards got stashed in the back and the climbing gear came back out. Spent a week in the Blue Mountains and another at Nowra, clipping bolts with friends met in Thailand. Finally, we limped the van down to Melbourne and passed it off to a friend, who managed to get it halfway back across town before it died a painful death in the middle of rush hour traffic.


permalink written by  Jason Kester on March 1, 2006 from Noosa Heads, Australia
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Climbing, Surfing, Blogabond and Hooptie

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Blogabond Global Headquarters

Ban Ao Nang, Thailand


I spent the winter of 2005/2006 on Tonsai Beach in southern Thailand. I seem to spend about every other winter in Thailand, climbing rocks on the beach. It's just that good. This time around I had some client work to keep me busy part time, and with the laptop along it was easy enough to spend the odd afternoon geeking out on Blogabond.

The site had been live for about 3 months at this point, and was finally starting to attract a few actual users. I'd been intentionally keeping a low profile, and letting people find the place on their own. As Joel ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ ) says, "when you get premature publicity, lots of people check out your thing, and it's not done yet, so now most of the people that tried your thing think it's lame, and now you have two problems: your thing is lame and everybody knows it."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/02/08.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/11/02.html

So, with a few Real People using the thing, I was able to get some feedback about why Real People think that Blogabond sucks. I've since fixed a lot of those things, and will hopefully get around to fixing more of them soon. For now though, there's this climbing route on the beach called Tyrolean Air that's been taking up a bunch of my time. It will be my first 7c, and I keep taking 20 foot falls from the endurance section above the crux. Sometimes, work has to take a back seat…


permalink written by  Jason Kester on February 1, 2006 from Ban Ao Nang, Thailand
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond and JoelOnSoftware

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A month later...

Ban Ao Nang, Thailand


Been here a whole month now, climbing rocks, working on the tan, and amassing stories. Maybe if I get some time I'll even tell some of them. Until then, know that life remains good.

permalink written by  Jason Kester on January 17, 2006 from Ban Ao Nang, Thailand
from the travel blog: Southeast Asia Again 2006
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Southeast Asian Travel Day

Bangkok, Thailand


Woke up in time for a nice cup of coffee on the lake in Phnom Penh and a few minutes to chill before another long travel day.

So, a half hour on a motorbike across town and an hour on a state of the art Cambodian airliner puts me back in lovely Bangkok in time to pick up the bags and jump on a night train to Surat Thani. Just 20 hours of buses, pickup trucks and longtail boats away from the beach. No worries!

permalink written by  Jason Kester on December 11, 2005 from Bangkok, Thailand
from the travel blog: Southeast Asia Again 2006
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The Killing Fields

Phnom Penh, Cambodia


Today I held a human skull in my hands.

The killing Fields are really something to behold. The site itself is nothing special. Just a small monument in a Field full of holes, but what it lacks in scope it makes up in impact. The monument itself is essentially a giant glass display case. 10 shelves, 20 feet by 20 feet, each stacked three high with piles of skulls that they have been digging up in the immediate vicinity. 8000 in all.

Walking among the mass graves, it took a while to register the scraps of cloth sticking out of the ground. This is Southeast Asia so you get used to trash everywhere. But eventually it sunk in that these were people’s clothes working their way out of the ground after the fall rains. Scratch the surface and you’ll find bones inside them. Visitors collect them in little shrines along with teeth and bits of clothing. The sign says there are 2000 more bodies that they plan to leave buried there. As I said, it’s a pretty powerful experience.


permalink written by  Jason Kester on December 10, 2005 from Phnom Penh, Cambodia
from the travel blog: Southeast Asia Again 2006
tagged KillingFields

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