On Building a Travel Blog
Behind the scenes from the guy on the laptop.
Jade and I started writing about our adventures on RS to remember all of the places we visited and to share the memories and experiences with our friends and family.
We wanted the reading experience to be the forefront of our website. We experimented with numerous designs, fonts, and colors and, in the end, this clean and simple design was perfect. But things change. Internet standards and browser compatibility changes all the time so we wanted to build a system that was immune to change or at least give us the option to change without too much of a hassle.
In the blogging world there are many options:
Tumblr
Squarespace
Wordpress
Blogger
Ghost
Medium
Weebly
Joobla
Drupal
Why we Chose Wordpress:
1. We are able to write on any of our mobile devices when we are on the go.
2. Adding or removing features doesn’t require much effort or website downtime.
3. Wordpress backend is so user friendly Jade can use it without asking questions.
4. Wordpress makes web design as easy as a Google search.
5. Wordpress is very well supported with a CMS with lots of developers and community to help.
So on Adding Features to RS:
Wordpress provided much of the structural features of RS. But plugins are extra features developed by the wonderful Wordpress community. These are a few of our favorites we’ve implemented:
Disqus:
The comment system is handled by Disqus which moderates spam automatically. Th default option would be to use Akismet with Wordpress’s proprietary comment system. We chose Disqus because it is widely used on other websites and it allows readers to comment by signing in with familiar social media credentials such as Twitter or Facebook. It’s also very clean looking and very easy to use.
Alpine PhotoTile:
Alpine PhotoTile handles most of our picture galleries. It has the ability to pull images off of basically anything like Instagram, Flickr or Tumblr. For the most part we use Flickr to house our images to reduce server load on our end. On our blog it’s as easy as filling in a set ID from Flickr; and Alpine PhotoTile outputs a shortcode that we copy and paste into a post. Images are responsive and look great.
TimelineJS:
We tried something new on one of our latest posts about Boston. I searched high and low for a timeline plugin that worked well with Wordpress. There were a few that could pull data from Twitter and Instagram but nothing that could take larger chunks of text and images. I stumbled upon TimelineJS after I became frustrated with the other options. It’s wonderfully easy to add to a blog post. It requires Google documents (now Google drive) account. It’s basically a fancy code that takes data from a google spreadsheet and turns it into a timeline. It’s relatively straight forward and looks very nice. It also works well on mobile and even understands swipes which was a bonus since one of our goals is to deliver a consistent reader experience.
Google Analytics for Wordpress:
Data is important. Google Analytics allows us to understand what types of posts our readers like and what posts they care less about. We are able to use this data to deliver more interesting posts about our travels.
WP Google Maps:
We use this in our Maps section. Our posts are linked to the places we write about. Readers can read stories by clicking on the little red pins. This thought this was a great way to visualize the extent of our experiences together.
Others:
There are of course general backend plugins like W3 Total Cache which helps subsequent pages load faster and a security plugin which protects our login page from multiple login attempts. These are more framework related that keep the site running smoothly.
On Ads:
I’m not a supporter of advertising, even though yes look at the right sidebar there are three banner ads. I do have to say thank you to every person who has visiting our site we have raised enough money over the past 8 months to pay for our hosting. I do believe that online advertising is a heavily saturated market and advertisers can place ads scarily in the most convenient of places. I hope for the day that I can replace those ads with some other feature but until then thanks for bearing with us, we appreciate all of the support.
