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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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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.


Chamonix Branch Office
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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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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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.


Blogabond Classic!
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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Astroturfing Robot Spiders!

Portland, United States

Woke up to 30 variations on this in my inbox today:

"As though I wanted will meet personally the author of clauses articles on your site, and personally to it him will get acquainted. But unfortunately I live in other country and I have no an opportunity to go on the world. Success to you the dear expensive friend. "

It looks like the SpamBots have finally found the comment links on Blog entries.

This one was especially fun, as it started out by simply commenting on a dozen different blogs, praising the author's "clauses" and offering ESL advice on how to better the world.

Then it started including helpful links to Porn.

I've put up a simple spam filter that should stop this sort of thing from clogging up the comments in the future. There's an off-chance that some of you may have trouble posting comments if you don't have Javascript enabled on your browser. Keep me posted if you notice anything strange.

Anyway, I've gone ahead and left a few of the more harmless comments to a few people's blogs. So if you're lucky, you might get an inspirational message like this in your comments:

"How many I was in a network the Internet, but your site my loved liked,favourite! Thanks."

Consider it a gift from the (hopefully) short-lived Astroturfing SpamBot!



permalink written by  Jason Kester on November 15, 2006 from Portland, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond and Spam
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BMail and stuff for the People!

Los Angeles, United States

First off, I want to quickly thank all you lot for helping Blogabond take off so quickly. Our user base doubled over the holidays, and then Doubled AGAIN in February! Somebody must have been spreading the word. You guys rock!

I've been quietly putting new features live for the last few months, and leaving them out there for you all to discover. So you may have noticed that your blog entries are autosaving themselves behind the scenes, that you can hide your draft entries until you're ready for the world to see them, and that you can add new places to the world map.

But this week, I finally got around to putting up a few major features that have been in the hopper for a long time. Blogabond was always intended to be a place for Independent Travelers to hang out and share stories, but until recently it's been sorta tough to get a conversation going with anybody on the site. Sure, you could leave comments on one of their posts, but unless they happened to check it they might never see it. And if they replied to you, how would you know?

So now, everybody gets a little Mail link next to their name. You can send private messages to anybody on the site. If you've got an account, you can check out your Inbox under the My Stuff tab, and if you've given us your Email address we'll even forward along any direct communication that you receive. So if you read my entry about Monkey Bay, Malawi and want to know if it's worth going, you can shoot me off a private message and ask me about it.

We've also got Buddies now. You've seen this idea before, so I don't need to go into detail, but yeah, you can now start collecting friends on the site and keeping tabs on what they're up to. Less digging around trying to find stuff. Thus, more better.

There's another feature teetering at the brink of being pushed live that will let you compliment users on their cool blog entries and photos. Once we get a bunch of votes for stuff, I'll probably scrap the idea of "Featured Whatever" and just let you guys decide what belongs on the Home page by voting on it. So if you want to displace The Hulk from his seat of glory, you can organize all your friends to come onto the site and vote on all your stuff. (Or I guess you could also just let the system work itself out so that things floated to the top on their own merit. But that might not be as much fun.)

Anyway, thanks again for helping to make Blogabond a reality. Keep up the suggestions!

Jason


permalink written by  Jason Kester on March 21, 2007 from Los Angeles, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond, Community and Buddies
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Votes, Photos, and Discussion

Portland, United States

This weekend, I've been blowing off a bunch of paying work so that I can put some new features into Blogabond. This is stuff that's been bugging me for a while and I think it will make the site just that little bit more usable.

First, it always bugged me that when you clicked on "Photos", you didn't get to see any Photos. Just a bunch of links. That was lame. So yeah, we need to put some pictures up there, but which ones? I dunno. Guess we can't do that until we do...

Voting. Yeah, check out the bottom of this post. See the little "This Rocks!" link? Click on that, and you'll give this post a little karma bonus. If enough people click it, maybe it will boost my profile up onto the homepage. Democracy in action!

So yeah, every post and every photo on the site now has one of those little vote buttons. You can vote photos onto the "Cool Photos" list, and vote people onto the "Featured Traveler" list.

And finally, I've messed with the discussion forums a bit so that people can actually figure out what they do. Try it out. Click the "Talk" link up top and ask your fellow Blogabonders a question. I bet you'll get a few replies.

Anyway, let me know if you like any of this new stuff. And hey, I'm off to Europe in a few days. If you're touring around France, Switzerland or Italy, let me know!


permalink written by  Jason Kester on April 22, 2007 from Portland, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond, Photos and Community
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Moving the HQ

Pamplona, Spain


View of Plaza Del Castillo from our terrace!
So it's official. I'm livin' in Spain! Signed a year lease on an apartment in Pamplona, and am now sipping my Cafe Solo' on the terrace overlooking Plaza del Castillo. It is all good here.


The calle out our back window
There is tons of great climbing within an hour's drive of this city. We've been sampling a bit of it, but mostly we've been trying to sort out little details for the apartment. Helen has gone into Nesting Mode, and is busy finding kitchen towels and throw pillows and all sorts of stuff it would have never occured to me to buy. I've been trying to get phone lines and DSL set up in broken Spanish.

San Fermines is about a month away, and I'm starting to think about gathering a pile of Blogabonders here for the festivities. See how many of us can get gored Running with the Bulls! If this sounds like a good idea to any of you, let me know and I'll find a way to make it happen.

permalink written by  Jason Kester on June 3, 2007 from Pamplona, Spain
from the travel blog: Living in Spain
tagged Blogabond, Apartment and PlazaDelCastillo
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Comments are disappearing

Beijing, China

People are leaving comments - all two of them! Cool! But I can't find them anymore. :-( What's with Blogabond?? If you need to contact me, best use my email address. Don't know it? Sorry, don't feel like sharing it here on a public site. Just be aware I'm not ignoring you, I just can't get back to the comments for some reason. :-/

permalink written by  prrrrl on February 23, 2012 from Beijing, China
from the travel blog: Beijing, 2010 or Liaoning, 2013. They are appear to be mixed up!
tagged Blogabond, Email, Comments and LostComments
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helllo

Chicago, United States

hiii..
heyy.. this is my very first blog on BLOGABLOND... so keep reading it in future my frnds..
you will find a lot of interesting things in it...
:)

permalink written by  samthomson on February 24, 2013 from Chicago, United States
from the travel blog: my first holiday
tagged Blogabond, Blog and InterestingThings
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