A few notes about the blogs

All these blogs were written whilst we were on holiday, more often than not in the early evening before dinner. The routine is we copy all the days photographs from our cameras onto a PC as a precaution against losing them and so we can see them on a bigger screen. I then write up my diary to remind us what we have done once we are back home as well as recording any interesting items before they are forgotten. This is particularly important on the longer 6 or 8 week holidays. Once that is complete I write the blog which is normally a summary of the above hopefully in a light humoured way.

The first blog I did was in 2013 when we visited Tanzania and it was on a platform called blog.com. The snag was we had to have internet connection whilst writing it. As our next big holiday included long periods on the Trans Siberian railway I moved to an application called Travelpod which could be run on a PC or iPad and then uploaded to the web when WiFi was available.

It worked really well so this is what we used from then until one awful day when Travelpod sent an email out saying they had been bought by Tripadvisor who were then going to close the site down and we would all lose everything. Up until then I was fairly relaxed about my blogs but now I became very possessive (and furious). Fortunately a Saint called Ryan was also affected and he quickly wrote a programme called Travelark which allowed users to copy all our blogs onto his site before Travelpod closed down. He upgraded his Travelark site over the years so it works in much the same was as Travelpod and for a few holidays I used his system. Blog.com also shut down, no idea why, so my first blog was lost. With this in mind I decided to use a web package that allows me to build the blogs on my own PC and copy them onto my own server space, that way I have full control and backup.

So since January 2019 I have written all our blogs on my own PC using a simple web editing package and as a precaution I also recreated all the old blogs in this new format. I just cut and paste the text from Travelark into the new pages and add the photographs, if I spoted an absolute howler in the spelling or grammar I corrected it otherwise they are just the same ramblings. They are not intended to be literary masterpieces, just a record of what I thought at the time. I managed to recreate the Tanzania blog from my diary although I lost quite a few of the observations and jokes that were in the original blog.
I still can’t understand why Tripadvisor would buy a blog site just to close it down, it seems perverse.