The Making of My Blog – Part 1

About 6 months ago (while we were planning our recent trip to France), I decided that I wanted to change the way that I was sending out my Excellent Adventure updates. As most of you know, I was previously just sending out emails to a large distribution list while we travelled on our adventures. While this method worked well enough, I wanted to get away from more or less forcing everyone to read my emails and have a more participatory method where people could choose to read when they wanted to. A web log (or blog) seemed to be the way to do this as it gave me a way to still communicate my travel observations but I also could do so on other areas of interest to me such as cooking and dining out.

Out of this was born this site www.excellentadventure.ca.

In order to run my new site, I needed to find some appropriate blog software. I evaluated one or two and eventually decide that WordPress was the right one for me. Once I had decided on WordPress, I spent the following several weeks trying to learn the nuance of it (which I am still in the process of) and got it to a point where I felt it was good enough to start working on adding some content like this posting.

This basically brings us to where I am today.

The Blog on Blog category on this site will be an ongoing commentary of my attempts to build and customize my site. At present, other than continuing to improve the look and feel of this blog, I have a few technical issues needed to be addressed:

1) As one of the main purposes of this site will be to discuss the details of our Excellent Adventures when we travel, I need to be able to efficiently post new blog entries from remote locations.

2) I need to make all efforts to ensure that my site is as secure as possible to avoid getting hacked and to withstand as much spam as possible.

To address the first point, I have already ordered a handheld computer which I will be taking with me on our trips. My first task when I receive this device will be to start testing software which will allow me to post new blog entries from it through the Internet.

No matter what, both of these tasks will likely start to consume much of my time over the next few months. Good thing that we arent leaving on our next trip until the end of September.

Baden