Day 239 | blog on day: sorting out the blog

rest day 6

Writing a blog seems like a good idea when travelling, documenting your experience for posterity, keeping in touch with family and friends, etc.

Ok, a huge lump of discipline is required, adding interesting stuff every day, so it’s lucky I really enjoy the task.

Once you start it’s a case of keeping at it. Out in the sticks with no power and little inclination to update it daily you can end up with quite a backlog once you have a day off with that power source. On the road I write a note in my archaic dead tree diary each day as to what the topic of the day should be and time is spent while those pedals are rotating thinking up various lines of thought. The lines I dream up are often forgotten by the time comes around to tap them out. [Later comment: I hadn’t worked out I should actually write the day’s blog on the day. That explains why the early entries were so concise.]

One line I started on and haven’t yet found the occasion to jot it down, “dust solidifies the air for a moment, then dissolves away”. Look out for that one. I’ve got quite a few topics that I haven’t found the right place for yet. Time on the Gibb left me with 3 weeks of entries to formulate which takes a few hours/days to make coherent. There’s a benefit from a few edits as well. Then the issue of uploading it all takes over.

The program I started to write my blog back at the start of the journey had a couple of major virtues: it’s incredibly easy to use and is linked to the photo repository (now with over 20k of photos from the trip).

That’s the joy of Mac’s for you.

The downside of the Mac is that if something goes wrong it can be daunting to work around.

Today for some reason I hit a wrong button and now I have had to load my complete website from ground zero and that includes the earlier life history photos as well. Umm, over 2 Gigs. I had a 10 hour card down at the internet cafe and used half of it to reload the site. 99% finished and … sorry, we are closing now.

You either load it all, or nothing.

Start again tomorrow.