Blogging and social media to document a tour.
 

We've some a long way since the instamatic camera and notebooks....or maybe we haven't. Anyway there are now multiple ways to keep people up to date with your tour. Of course there's CGOAB and you can have your own blog on WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr. But the simplicity of posting pictures with comments to Instagram, Twitter and Facebook is also attractive. For my next tour I think I'll use Instagram and cross post to Twitter, Facebook and my blog. What are you thinking of doing? or what have you done and how did it work?

this will be interesting to read, as I am such a luddite in this regard. I just havent had an urge to do this stuff yet. Perhaps its because I havent done a long trip in ages, but part of it is simply just not feeling like doing a "sharing" thing with everyone, or even at a more basic level, taking the time every day to write things. I'm still rather ambivalent about facebook, and cant even be bothered to figure out all the different settings of who sees what.

who knows, perhaps this thread will open my eyes to diff possibilities and easy ways to do small stuff mit fotos.

I have my own website: www.machka.net where I post touring and randonneuring stories.

And I use Flickr to post photos.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/machka-bb/collections/

I was looking at this phone app for this purpose, but have not tried it yet. https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...rms_1002&hl=en

I have never created a website in my life but recently weebly.com was suggested to me - I set up a fantastic new site for blogging my trip within a couple of hours. So simple and easy to do and it looks good, if I don't say so myself. And its 100% free of charge
I have an iPhone and downloaded the weebly app meaning I can simply and easily update the blog on the go. It's actually easier and simpler than updating Facebook from my phone.
I have decided to avoid updating Facebook too much as a lot of people there won't actually care about my daily struggles, happy thoughts and random stories.
I intend to update twitter and maybe Instagram but I can post photos to my site in seconds from my phone.
My site is www.gordybennett.com and twitter @gordybennett

I don't think that Facebook is a good blogging medium but you could post links to your blog as you update it.

Web sites, including CG, are ephemeral things, here today, gone tomorrow. Print your journals if you expect your grandchildren to read of your daring do. Being able to easily print a journal on CG is one of that site's many convenient features. Plus the exposure to a big audience.

I'll do daily rough drafts of journal entries but wait till I am home to clean them up, process photos/videos, and publish to CGOAB. Along the way I might do brief updates a couple of times a week on social media and the family blog.

Gee, thanks.

I documented my first tour with paper, pen and a 35mm camera. Internet wasn't as universal then as it is now, nor were digital cameras. A couple of years ago I transcribed those journal entries and scanned the photos into CGOAB. Some of the tours I've done since are also on CGOAB, but the latest one is on my own website, which is not strictly bike-related.

I enjoy blogging these tours for my own future reference as well as for anyone else who may be interested. On trips in which I didn't keep a journal, I forget the details after awhile and it all becomes kind of a big blur.

I don't do Facebook or Twitter, and agree that they wouldn't be the best method of blogging a tour, since (presumably) many of your virtual friends wouldn't be interested in that level of detail of your trip.

The nice thing about creating your own website is that all the whole thing is stored on your own computer too. You create it on your own computer, and then upload it. That way, even if you decide not to maintain a website anymore, everything you've written is still there, and could be printed or moved to a different internet place as desired.

As for Facebook (I have no idea about Twitter, I've never used it), it's OK for one sentence updates to a small collection of family and friends, but not for a detailed blog. And working with photos in Facebook is a pain.

A blog is definitely the most versatile and best for descriptive passages. But Instagram has it's good points and you can automatically cross post to twitter, facebook and a blog....that's particularly easy if you use Tumblr. Instagram also puts your pictures on a google map.