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Blogging on Slow Travel

Whether you run your blog on SlowTrav or elsewhere, we encourage all travelers to keep a blog - so we can follow along with your planning and travels!

What are Blogs?

Blogs are online journals that people keep while making travel plans and when traveling. To create your blog, you login to a blog control panel, such as www.blogger.com or the control panel we run for Movable Type, and write your entries online. You can write text, upload photos, link to other websites, etc. Then you publish the entry to your blog so everyone can read it.

You determine in the blog setup where the blog is published - i.e. what website URL it is at. There are three types of places you can publish:

  • On Slow Travel. Contributing Premium members can publish their blogs on Slow Travel for no additional charge. We help you get it set up. See below for more information.
  • On your website. If you have a website, setup a folder to hold your blog and use Blogger to publish it to that folder. Or install blogging software on your website and use it to publish your blog (e.g. Movable Type, WordPress).
  • On free blog hosting websites. Check out www.blogger.com or www.typepad.com to find free hosting options.

Why Blog?

Blog while planning your trip to share your planning information. Blog during your trip so friends, family members and Slow Travelers can follow along with you on your trip. Blog so that when you get home, you have lasting memories of the trip.

We recommend that when your trip is over, you turn your blog into a Slow Travel Trip Report. This way it is stored, in chronological order, on Slow Travel for everyone to enjoy.

Run Your Blog on Slow Travel

You are welcome to run your blog on Slow Travel if you are a message board Premium Member ($30/year). Having your blog on Slow Travel benefits you in a few ways:

  • We setup your blog for you.
  • We provide support in the "How do I?" forum on the message board.
  • The Slow Travel website is well indexed by Google, so your blog will be indexed frequently. People searching on Google for topics covered in your blog, will find your blog.
  • Your blog will be listed in the top section of our Slow Travel Blogs page.
  • Your blog will be indexed by our Slow Travel search engine, so when people search the Slow Travel site, your blog may show up in the search results.

The content of your blog is not owned by Slow Travel and Slow Travel is not responsible for your content (we do ask for access to your blog for support reasons). You can say what you like, but we ask you to refrain from indecent and racist comments. We also ask that you not discuss politics in a hostile manner. Same with religion.

Slow Travel has the right to cancel your blog at any time, but the content will be made available to you to move to another host (i.e., another non-Slow Travel web address). By posting your blog with Slow Travel, you maintain ownership of your writing but give Slow Travel unrestricted and perpetual license to display it.

You may upload photos, but if you have lots of photos, we ask you instead to upload them to a photo album on www.slowphotos.com and link to the album from the blog. It is not good practice to load up a blog with photos - one or two in an entry are okay, but more just slows down the pages.

Creating Your New Slow Travel Blog

Slow Travel uses Movable Type (a licensed version) to run blogs. The software is installed on our server. The database of blog entries and the uploaded photos are on our server.

Movable Type makes blogging easy, and publishing on SlowTrav is easy too. We will setup your blog for you.

  • Email our HELP email address (see Contact Us) and tell us you want to setup a blog on SlowTrav. Give us your message board member name and corresponding e-mail address. You must be a Premium Member ($30/year) to run a blog on SlowTrav (this covers the time we spend getting you setup on the blog).
  • Decide on a folder name for your blog. All blogs have URLs (links) in the format:
    www.slowtrav.com/blog/pauline/
    Tell us what you want your folder name to be (it is "pauline" in the example above) and we will assign that to your blog if it is not already taken.
  • We create an account on our Movable Type system, setup your blog folder and create a blog for you on Movable Type. We apply the standard Slow Travel Template to your blog, so it will look similar to this:
    www.slowtrav.com/blog/pauline/
    We do a test post to be sure it works. Then we email you with the information you need to access the Movable Type control panel and your blog.
    Note: You can change the template for your blog if you want a different look.
  • When you login to Movable Type, you will see your new blog in your Movable Type account. We will still have access from our Administrator account in case you need us to check something.

Now you are ready to start blogging! Movable Type is easy to use. I have some notes describing the basics. Read more about how to use Movable Type.

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