View Full Version : Journal postings
ricksavard
12-11-2013, 12:32
Help:
How can I post my journal entries on the internet daily without a smart phone? Any ideas or suggestions? Thank you. Rick
ChinMusic
12-11-2013, 12:36
Type up your entries in Notepad. Copy/paste the entries when you have a cell signal. I could pretty much stay up to date this way.
Phone in your report to your loved ones and have them post it. Wait until you get to a library. Bum someones I phone. Do like one guy did last year and buy a cheap laptop. Mail it to yourself at the first stop, Neel's Gap. Post a report then bounce it to Hiawassee then repeat the process all the way to Maine. He did that so he could process youtube video. Smoke signals?
ChinMusic
12-11-2013, 16:55
I'm sorry. I didn't read the part about "without a Smartphone".
max patch
12-11-2013, 17:07
Just write up everything old school and mail home to a family member or friend to key into your online journal. Your fans will read everything a couple weeks after the fact. No big deal.
FarmerChef
12-11-2013, 17:31
Just write up everything old school and mail home to a family member or friend to key into your online journal. Your fans will read everything a couple weeks after the fact. No big deal.
This. But I am confused as to whether or not you want updates to occur every day in time with your hiking days or you are ok with your daily log being uploaded in chunks at later dates. If you want it uploaded every day in "real time" I don't see how you do that without internet access, either via phone, or a computer in a library, hostel, etc. Otherwise, the old-school paper and pen method works just fine.
Good question.
I don't like typing on my phone, don't want the weight of a tablet, don't feel like burdening a loved one with having to post timely updates, and haven't a clue how often I will have access to a computer in towns. I realize this is a "1st world" problem, and I suppose the solution is to post short updates along the trail, and then add details from a notebook whenever I hit a town, but if anyone knows of an I-phone keypad accessory that is lightweight and tough, I'd like to hear of it, and like to get one from Santa Claws.
"... but if anyone knows of an I-phone keypad accessory that is lightweight and tough, I'd like to hear of it, and like to get one from Santa Claws. "
I've used two different bluetooth folding keyboards on thru-hikes; I got the second one because a smartphone replacement wouldn't work with the old one.
Both were fine in terms of being "tough". On all three of my longest trips (and in Spain just this Autumn) I carried the keyboard in the back EXternal mesh of my pack, just wrapped in bubblewrap, itself inside a ziplock bag. They survived that just fine.
I won't recommend a specific model as if I were starting fresh now I'd survey the options again.
"Lightweight" varies some, but the lightest unit out there might be a little flimsy I think, so somewhat of a tension there perhaps? I think the very lightest unit you can buy also sacrifices quite a bit of tactile feedback/functionality.
I suspect that ANY folding keyboard that you select will require some modest adjustment to typing style --- keys are mostly laid out the same, but probably a little different than keyboards that you normally use. Fortunately, we humans are flexible creatures and we adapt, after a bit of cursing and typos along the way.
Tips:
(1) Make sure you get one that uses a couple of AAA batteries. One set of batteries should last you at least half a thru-hike if not all of it, and they're easily replaced. You don't want one that's powered by microUSB port ...
(2) If you're hiking in fairly cold weather and the keyboard acts up, try putting it in an inside pocked for a few minutes before typing up your journal entry. My second keyboard flaked out on me when it was pretty cold out and it took me a long time to figure out the problem.
(3) I recommend looking around online long enough to improve your odds that the driver software for the keyboard you select will work for your specific phone and operating system. Sometimes it takes a little creativity and geek factor to get one of these working, and a little poking at soft buttons each time you want to start typing. Or at least for me, it was never a reliable one-button experience. Hopefully your combination of devices and pantheon of software will make for a better experience.
To find these units just google "bluetooth folding keyboard" and go to work.
The upside of all of this is that I very happily wrote up everything I wanted about my trips, at the end of each day while it was fresh, in a way that I would never have done with pencil and paper or voice recorder or any other option. I blogged literally every hiking day, here on the off chance you're interested in an example of the result: http://www.postholer.com/brianle
rusty bumper
12-12-2013, 20:00
On my hike in 2011, I used a LG Cosmos from Verizon. It's not a smart phone but I was able to add a "data package" to it for $10/month that allowed me to send email that included text and photos with gmail. I never used the "data package" for anything other than that. The following entry from my Trail Journals, describes how it all worked. BTW, Cathy is my wife who was back home in Cleveland. Here goes:
A number of people have asked howthese journal entries find their way to the website. Here's how we’re doing it:first, I write the entry as an email on my cell phone in the evening and saveit as a draft. Actually I usually write 3 - 1 that just has the photo and 2others for the text since I am limited on the number of characters I can writein an email and I seem to always have more to say than will fit in one email.When I’m done writing them, they’re full of spelling errors and I don’t bothermuch with capitalization and punctuation - after all, I’m using my big thumbson this dinky little keyboard! Then in the morning, usually when I'm atop amountain where I have a strong enough Verizon signal, I send the emails toCathy. She pastes them into Microsoft Word and does all the corrections andcleanup. She then logs in to the trail journals web site, adds the photo andthe entry text using sites procedures, logs off, and the day’s entry is thereto be read. We’ve worked this out to a science by now and as long as I can geta good Verizon signal in the morning (which happens most of the time) the newentry with photo gets posted well before noon.
Thanks very much...this is so helpful!
On my hike in 2011, I used a LG Cosmos from Verizon. It's not a smart phone but I was able to add a "data package" to it for $10/month that allowed me to send email that included text and photos with gmail. I never used the "data package" for anything other than that. The following entry from my Trail Journals, describes how it all worked. BTW, Cathy is my wife who was back home in Cleveland. Here goes:
A number of people have asked howthese journal entries find their way to the website. Here's how we’re doing it:first, I write the entry as an email on my cell phone in the evening and saveit as a draft. Actually I usually write 3 - 1 that just has the photo and 2others for the text since I am limited on the number of characters I can writein an email and I seem to always have more to say than will fit in one email.When I’m done writing them, they’re full of spelling errors and I don’t bothermuch with capitalization and punctuation - after all, I’m using my big thumbson this dinky little keyboard! Then in the morning, usually when I'm atop amountain where I have a strong enough Verizon signal, I send the emails toCathy. She pastes them into Microsoft Word and does all the corrections andcleanup. She then logs in to the trail journals web site, adds the photo andthe entry text using sites procedures, logs off, and the day’s entry is thereto be read. We’ve worked this out to a science by now and as long as I can geta good Verizon signal in the morning (which happens most of the time) the newentry with photo gets posted well before noon.
Thanks...Verizon coverage is spotty hereabouts, but that's a different topic.
i think I need a Cathy...lol.
an example of the result: http://www.postholer.com/brianle
Great journal, Brian! (Would you recommend postholer over trailjournals? It seems more "geek factor" (as you cool kids put it) especially setting it up.)
Nick
postholer.com
12-13-2013, 02:20
Any 'non-smart' phone or *any* device that has email capabilities can update your postholer.com journal. Instructions:
http://postholer.com/journal/help.php?#JournalUpdatesByEmail
No pencils, snail-mail or Cathy's required! :)
"Would you recommend postholer over trailjournals? It seems more "geek factor" (as you cool kids put it) especially setting it up."
I think that most if not all of the "geek factor" stuff is optional, it just represents added functionality that trailjournals doesn't. I.e., in the setup you can leave a lot of the fields blank if you don't know what RSS is or want to use a SPOT device or directly add entries via email or whatever.
I started with trailjournals in 2008 but switched to postholer as the latter was clearly better for use with a mobile device. Along the way, postholer made changes to improve how they work for mobile devices, including the above (option to send a formatted email that goes in directly as a journal entry). It's possible that trailjournals has improved along the way too; from a hasty look just now, however, I doubt it. I suggest that a quick test might be to just *view* some journal entries on both trailjournals and postholer using a smartphone. For postholer, at the upper left corner of the site there's a "postholer mobile" link that switches you to a much simpler interface that allows you to do the essential things with limited bandwidth required, all of which work fine on a small screen (you might want to pinch-zoom the upper corner, however, to be able to read the link to switch views, depending on the size of your screen and how good your eyesight is).
Trying just now to get to trailjournals on my smartphone netted me nothing but an large blue rectangle on a white background ... useless.
So try it yourself, YMMV. My sense is that for actually working from a small screen device, postholer is the way to go unless you have your own "other" blogging process that you already like with a mobile device. trailjournals and postholer are good, however, insofar as folks in the backpacking community know about these, i.e., if you like the idea of others following your journey, more chance of that via one of these sites, and they are, after all, blogging sites designed for just this sort of thing.
I will say that a couple of other things I like about postholer is the map integration (including automatic updating for SPOT users if you're into that), and the mobile-friendly site's weather reports.