Trail Journal/Blog Sharing

[JTVU2693]

All!

I am planning a Thru-Hike starting in March 2016 and am wondering if those of you who have hiked the trail before could offer some advice about what platform you used to share your journey with the world.

I am interested in keeping some sort of blog/trail journal to post publicly as a supplement to my own personal journal, but cannot find any articles or forums about what site is the best and allows for best overall experience.

I will also be bringing an iPhone 6 on Verizon so I assume that I will be able to connect to the internet to post.

Any and all thoughts are welcome! Thank you!

[Walkintom]

Wordpress. You can get a wordpress site for free, there's an app that allows you to post easily, and if you decide to upgrade to a blog on your own paid site, migration is fairly simple.

[BrianLe]

Depends on what you want to optimize for. Search this site for previous threads on the topic, lots of discussion already, and no new options since that I'm aware of (?). For use from a smartphone directly, I personally prefer http://www.postholer.com

[mattjv89]

All!

I will also be bringing an iPhone 6 on Verizon so I assume that I will be able to connect to the internet to post.

Any and all thoughts are welcome! Thank you!

I wouldn't assume you'll be able to regularly post through data on any carrier. Verizon is the best overall it seems but there are plenty of dead spots where a text will barely go through never mind a blog post. It's often unpredictable too, I've had many times where there's poor signal on a mountain top and 3 bars of 4G deep in a gap. Go figure that one. Also wifi hot spots are frequently very slow due to every hiker in the room trying to do the same thing at the same time. I know it can be done with the amount of people who post regular updates, but I've watched many a blogger frustrated with trying to post something on poor signal. I suppose it comes down a lot to how much you want to tie yourself to towns and technology

[BrianLe]

I think it depends on what you want to post. My approach generally is to post text only from the trail if I happen to have service, time, and sufficient power to spare. More often than not, more often the text of my posts gets uploaded from a trail town. Just uploading text doesn't take much bandwidth so it less of a problem. With postholer, at least, you can create all of the text offline in a particular format and just send it as an email, and the site will post it (and you can attach one photo that way too).

For image files, of course the bandwidth hit is greater, so certainly if wi-fi is flakey it can be an issue. My own process was to wait for a zero day with decent wi-fi before trying to upload photos. And I often used an app to reduce the image file sizes before doing so. Photos are great (!) in trail journal entries, but for me it was always more important to get the text up there in a reasonably timely fashion --- so that folks I knew back home would have a better (and more up to date) idea of how things were going for me, where I was at, etc.

[2000miler]

Wordpress, for sure. Really easy to set up and easy posts from the field on iPhone as well (can't speak to the other phone platforms). Intuitive dropping of pictures, captions, and formatting. I had my blog set up in a few hours, with zero technical knowledge beforehand. Google is your friend - There are lots of Wordpress tutorials out there.

Plus, it makes it easier for others to follow you. The "follow" feature on wordpress (and to a lesser extent, blogspot) will aggregate the blogs someone follows on wordpress in a "reader" format. I find myself visiting most posts from the 20 or so people I follow on Wordpress who are out on the trail now, and Wordpress makes it easy to like / comment, or to reply to comments on your own blog.

My advice would be to set up a dummy account try it out on each platform.