I’ve been a frequent international traveller since I was twenty years old, and I’ve been keeping journals of those trips the whole time. A few years back, I started sharing some of the journal entries with an email list of friends and family. Recently, a few friends (those not smart enough to correctly configure their spam filters) have asked me why I don’t post these entries to the blog.
The answer is pretty simple. I generally figure that people read my blog because they’re interested in what I’m talking about, not specifically that they’re interested in me. Travel posts tend more to be about me, and therefore for friends and family, not for the seven people nice enough to subscribe to the blog.
Hence, this solution: I’m publishing some of my recent posts, illustrated with photos, on this blog as “pages”, not as posts. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, you can follow the links below and read the stories. If you’re not, you can ignore them and future posts won’t clutter your RSS reader.
Travel stories posted today:
Tokyo Journal – Tokyo and Chiba, Japan, spring 2005.
The Road Warrior – from the Atlanta Airport, spring 2005.
A Travel Prayer – onboard a Northwest Airlines flight, winter 2004.
A Visit From the Laundry Fairy – Accra, Ghana, summer 2004.
Spanish Food Porn – Barcelona, Spain, summer 2004.
The Turkish Bath – Istanbul, Turkey, winter 2003.
Interesting… My blog, in many ways, has followed the opposite path. I’ve been travel writing seriously since 1995, since going to the not long after getting out of college. I always used my personal homepage (which evolved into a blog) as a way for friends, colleagues and families to keep up on whatever I was up to. For parts of the year that meant work, but for others it was travel, and I was always more prolific as a travel writer. So travel writing became a backbone of what my personal online presence was all about. When I go back and look at the 20 or so websites I’ve created over the years, the majority of them are travel related.
Now, I’m in an interesting position in that much of my blog audience seems to expect both. When I don’t travel for a while, I start to get emails asking when I’ll be off on another adventure. If I’m traveling a lot, people will email and ask if I plan to post comments about this-or-that tech story in the news that week. So far, I’ve never received comments from someone asking me to have it one way or the other.
In case there are those who do feel that way, I may set up separate RSS feeds for each of my site’s categories. So for those who like my travel stories, they can choose that RSS feed rather than ones on podcasting or WSIS or whatever.
So hopefully I can keep maintaining the right balance. Travel stories are just too much of who I am, both online and offline. :-)
andy
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