Blogabond Classic!

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!

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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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!

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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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.

Chamonix Branch Office

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.

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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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.

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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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.

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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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.

The Oz Hooptie

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.

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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On Tyrolean Air, 7c

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

Off Tyrolean Air, 7c

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!

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 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.

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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