Loading...
Start a new Travel Blog! Blogabond Home Maps People Photos My Stuff

Building Blogabond

a travel blog by Jason Kester



Almost a year into development, and most of the way around the world, it finally occurs to me that the process of constructing this site deserves its own travel blog. Hope you enjoy...
view all 14 photos for this trip

Show Oldest First
Show Newest First

Nowra, Australia



permalink written by  Jason Kester on April 22, 2006 from Nowra, Australia
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
Send a Compliment

Melbourne, Australia



permalink written by  Jason Kester on April 28, 2006 from Melbourne, Australia
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
Send a Compliment

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
Send a Compliment

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
Send a Compliment

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
Send a Compliment

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
Send a Compliment

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
Send a Compliment

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
Send a Compliment

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
Send a Compliment

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
Send a Compliment
Viewing 11 - 20 of 20 Entries
first | previous | next | last

View as Map View as Satellite Imagery View as Map with Satellite Imagery Show/Hide Info Labels Zoom Out Zoom In Zoom Out Zoom In
find city:
Jason Kester Jason Kester
14 Trips
250 Photos

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.
...

trip feed
 author feed
 trip kml
 author kml

   

Blogabond v2.40.58.80 © 2024 Expat Software Consulting Services about : press : rss : privacy