RV’ing to Parks and Wineries in Italy

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Faye and I recently returned from Italy, a wonderful country that we last visited in 1985. The cuisine and the wine were even better than we remembered from our last trip.

One of the things that has changed is the emergence of RV’s across “the boot”. According to IdeaMerge, there are over 2000 campgrounds frequented by RV’ers in Italy. Their prevalence surprised us for a couple of reasons: there’s a lot less space in Italy than in North America - 58 million people in an area just larger than Arizona; and gas prices there are about twice what they are in the US. On the other hand, rigs were smaller than at home, and since stuff is closer together there are fewer miles to pump up for!

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Best Alaska Trip Journals

I love living travel vicariously through others’ footsteps. Definitely the next best thing to being there.

Alaska rivals any place on earth for its sheer beauty. Here are my favourites of the best Alaska Trip Journals over the past 12 months. A huge thank-you to these incredible authors/photographers:

Most beautiful sunset, from ‘Wiseman9′:

Most territory covered, from ‘AlaskaExpedition2007′:

Cutest bird, from ‘Tschumper’s Alaskan Journey 2007′:

Most colourful photo, from ‘Holladays in Alaska’:

Trip farthest afield, from ‘BinkleyAlaska2007′:

Best glacier shot, from ‘Holladays in Alaska’:

Dan Parlow

Personal Travel Websites by RV.Net ; Online Travel Journals by MyTripJournal.com ; Explore Good Sam Club Trip Journals ; Woodalls Trip Journals ; Travel Journals by Trailer Life Directory ; Traveling USA Travel Blogs

Blog vs Trip Journal: Part 3 - Guests and Messaging

Blogs commonly allow guests to post comments related to a single posting. Most commonly, the comment is posted, an email is dispatched to the blogger, and the blogger can then decide to delete. In this way, RV.net authors - myself included - have received quality info from the public on the subject of our informative blogs. Different blogging platforms allow for different levels of control over these comments.

Since Trip Journals are primarily a personal record of your own trip, guest comments are treated differently. Rather than including factual comments on each posting, visitors to your Trip Journal can elect to leave you a personal message through a ‘Leave a Message’ link. Often these messages have nothing whatsoever to do with your individual postings:

Messaging the Trip Journaler

This is like sending a personal email to someone, but with the added advantages that: (a) other visitors may see it; and (b) the message retains the connection to your trip.

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Use Descriptive Trip Journal Titles to entice the World

So you are really into the trip journaling thing…all your friends and family are on your update list, but you are hungry for more…a larger audience to share your adventures with.

If you are in fact trying to drive traffic to your Trip Journal, keywords in titles are actually very important. It helps the search engine spiders index your site and lets the Google-searching world find you more easily.

Alaska-Yukon travel journal

Phoenix, Arizona. An accurate description of where you have been? Yes. A catchy title? Not really. I must admit I have fallen into this myself. Too lazy or not feeling imaginative enough to wow my readers with an eye-catching title. However, it can make a huge difference to bringing people to your site and making people actually want to read your content. How about “Taking in the Arts in Phoenix”? Now with search engines, this tiny step will transform your article from one of thousands about Phoenix to one of perhaps a few dozen about the arts in Phoenix.

Not only will adding descriptive titles help folks find you, but it will entice them to look further and click to read your stories. Ask yourself if you were searching, which of these two articles would you be most likely to click on?

June 2/07 Spying the Florida Panther

or June 2/07 The Everglades

Likely the first one: the first is evocative and enticing; the second you could have seen a million times.

Dan Parlow
Personal Travel Websites by RV.Net ; Online Travel Journals by MyTripJournal.com ; Explore Good Sam Club Trip Journals ; Woodalls Trip Journals ; Travel Journals by Trailer Life Directory ; Traveling USA Travel Blogs

TripJournal Feeds follow Destination-Specific Content

RSS feeds for some 2,900 destinations were recently released in the MyTripJournal system, allowing you to subscribe to real travelers’ Trip Journal entries specific to say, Grand Canyon National Park, Las Vegas or Atlantic Canada. Subscribing is easy and free, and can be done from Good Sam Club’s ‘Explore’ pages or similar pages on MyTripJournal.com or its partner sites.

What do the feeds consist of?

These feeds are a simple way for people to follow frequently updated content. In this case, we aggregate the Trip Journal entries of many different travelers keeping Trip Journals for a common destination. Journal entries must meet specified rules to be included: for instance, entries must be on public journals, contain content of a certain length and include a map point within the relevant RSS area.

Each feed begins with the title and a snippet of the relevant entry article. Entries are then sorted with the most recent at the top . Here is the most current content from the Grand Canyon feed. Click on the title of any Entry that is enticing, to see the full article and associated photos, videos and a link back to the traveler’s Trip Journal homepage:

• Grand Canyon!
  We made it to the Grand Canyon around 5pm. Amazing! We hiked around for an hour, shopped for chatzkes and hit the road again. Trying to make it to Gallup NM tonight. Weather throughout the California and Arizona Deserts was a dry, warm 85. It cooled off to 55 up at 6,000 feet when we hit the Grand Canyon. Sunny skies everywhere!…

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Backing up your Trip Journal Content - Part 2

Last week I reviewed the elements of archiving through the MyTripJournal system. This week I’ll review how to back up blog content with 3 of the web’s most popular blogging sites: Blogger, Typepad and WordPress. For the most part, these backups are free, but they are very different from the interactive and comprehensive backup and archive available to premium subscribers to the MyTripJournal system.

Backups from Blogger

Unlike MyTripJournal, the Blogger system does not include a direct export or download function. However you can generate a single file with all your posts that can then be published and copied to your PC. If you aren’t finished with the blog at the time you create the backup, make sure you save the template so it can be reused in this process again.

For complete instructions on how to create this backup file, click here.

Backups from TypePad

The TypePad system does include an Export tool that allows users to download their blog posts. However this backup is a plain-text file and doesn’t backup any of the account’s templates or files. At present, there is no way to backup Basic templates. Users with Advanced Templates can copy and paste their existing templates into text files to save them.

There is no way to back up Photo Albums on TypePad either. To create a backup, you will need to save each webpage of your site as ‘web page complete’. Typepad recommends keeping an archive of your photos in another location for safe keeping.

You can find backup instructions for TypePad here.

Backups from WordPress

To back up your WordPress content, you will need to back up both the files and the database. Backing up the site files is quite easy, but backing up the database is a fairly lengthy process using a database utility. Most website hosts will provide this utility for you free of charge and typically one called phpMyAdmin which is a web-based MySQL database administration tool is offered. The database backups can also be quite large, but one perk is you can automate the backup process.

Exporting Your WordPress Database

For instructions on backing up your WordPress content, please take a look at the following link.

Dan Parlow
<Personal Travel Websites by RV.Net ; Online Travel Journals by MyTripJournal.com ; Explore Good Sam Club Trip Journals ; Woodalls Trip Journals ; Travel Journals by Trailer Life Directory ; Traveling USA Travel Blogs

Backing up your Trip Journal content - Part 1

This is part of a series of posts on a comparison between Trip Journals and blogs.

Today , I’ll consider the ease with which your trip history can be backed up using a Trip Journal. Next week, I’ll consider the same question using 3 major blog systems.

Backups from your Trip Journal

The MyTripJournal system offers a comprehensive backup tool for premium subscribers. This permits you to archive the following content:

• Your Trip Journal in the same form that your visitors see it on the Web - with maps and linked entries with stories, photos, videos, your guestbook, etc. in html format. This format is useful as: (a) a permanent memory of your trip; (b) a periodic backup for peace-of-mind; and (c) posting to another webserver.
• The original of your photos in the resolution and quality that you uploaded them.
• Your entire message in-box. This includes messages from family and friends that you elected not to post to your Guestbook, and .

Backing Up Your Trip Journal

You can obtain these in two forms:

1. By web download from your Archive Center. Click to request the desired files.
2. On a CD or DVD sent to your home. (Once annually, min. 6 mo. subscription).

The archiving features are not available to free subscribers.

Further detail can be found at www.mytripjournal.com/faqs and in your Trip Journal’s Archive Center.

Dan Parlow

Personal Travel Websites by RV.Net ; Online Travel Journals by MyTripJournal.com ; Explore Good Sam Club Trip Journals ; Woodalls Trip Journals ; Travel Journals by Trailer Life Directory ; Traveling USA Travel Blogs

Blog vs Trip Journal: the Difference. Part 1 - Mapping

I’m often asked on the difference between a blog and a Trip Journal. This came up recently in a reader’s comment here. I’ll address the differences today and in some future postings.

Today , I’ll focus on mapping. Each of your travel maps is a picture that paints a thousand words. I’ll start with a typical Trip Journal homepage “default” map. This is the first map you come to when you come to the Wisemans’ Trip Journal, “Mexico Bound - Winter 2007“. Note how the daily entries to the right correspond to the numbers on the map:

Wisemans USA to Mexico

Now click on the Yucatan link below the map, and you’ll see this snapshot of the Wisemans’ visit to the Peninsula:

Wisemans Hit the Yucatan

Finally here is the Wisemans’ Travel Homepage. To the right are links to all 11 of their Trip Journals. You can click on the green lines or the links to the right to go directly into the daily journal entries:

Wisemans’ “Travel Homepage”

Dan Parlow

Personal Travel Websites by RV.Net ; Online Travel Journals by MyTripJournal.com ; Explore Good Sam Club Trip Journals ; Woodalls Trip Journals ; Travel Journals by Trailer Life Directory ; Traveling USA Travel Blogs

Faster Uploads to your Trip Journal

We’ve all experienced it…a lousy internet hookup at your campsite that makes you feel like you’ve returned to the days of dial-up. When you’re on the road it is not always easy to find a fast connection, but like many of you, I am not going to let that stop me from getting my photos up on my Trip Journal for my friends and family to see. One option is to take lower-res photos (discussed in my earlier postings) … but let’s say you want to take high-res photos, and do a quick-and-dirty upload.

So now you have a bunch of photo files, all over a megabyte each and they are taking forever to upload. So you’ve been individually resaving them in a photo editing software program to make them smaller. Well there is a much easier way…through your ordinary email program! This enables many Trip Journalers to upload thousands of photos to a single journal while on the road:

Fast, Easy Photo Uploads

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Movie clips in your Trip Journal

Wildly popular on YouTube, movie (video) clips are an increasingly popular component of Trip Journals / Personal Travel Websites, and can be archived for a permanent record of your RV trip, as with the rest of your journal’s contents.

There are now thousands of movie clips uploaded within the ‘best trip journals’ system and many thousands more by other journalers within the MyTripJournal system.

El Condor Pasa

Movie clips are a fun way for folks at home to enjoy your experiences in living colour, and a treasured part of your permanent Trip Journal. Under the right circumstances, they can bring back much more vivid memories than photos alone, as do these condor clips to me and my family.

MyTripJournal accepts videos in most major file formats, so as you are traveling you can just upload the movie clip directly from your camera to your MyTripJournal website. In turn, they can be viewed by all major internet browsers and plug-ins. Depending on your level of service, you can upload up to 3 at a time.

Before uploading, review these steps to get the best quality movie and the fastest upload times for you and your visitors.

Dan Parlow

Personal Travel Websites by RV.Net ; Online Travel Journals by MyTripJournal.com ; Explore Good Sam Club Trip Journals ; Woodalls Trip Journals ; Travel Journals by Trailer Life Directory ; Traveling USA Travel Blogs

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