Travel Blogging
from a standing start

What this thing is

You are going somewhere. The people who love you would like to know where you are. This turns that into one web page, at one address, that fills itself in as you go.

Not a blog with a homepage and categories and an archive. One trip, one page. It has a map with your route drawn on it, a calendar of the days you were away, and your photographs and notes stacked up underneath in order. It knows which stop you are at right now and says so at the top, so somebody who opens it at breakfast can see where you were at bedtime.

There is no subscription and nothing recurring. Nothing expires while a ticket sits unused — the clock only starts when you post your first stop, so you can buy one in March for a trip in October and it will wait.

Go and look at some first. Open the-places-you-will-go.com/examples before you read any further. There are five there: one trip that is happening as you read it, two that are finished, and two that have not started yet. Five minutes with those will teach you more than this whole chapter.

1 Getting your travelogue

Everything starts with a ticket. A ticket is not the travelogue yet — it is the right to make one. It is printable, it can be given away, and whoever is holding it owns it. There are four ways to end up with one.

a. Buy one for yourself

1. Go to the-places-you-will-go.com and press START YOUR TRIP — $25.
2. The checkout page opens with FOR MYSELF already chosen. There is nothing to type. Press PAY $25.00.
3. You are handed to Stripe to enter your card. Your card details never touch this site.
4. You come back to a form that asks you to name the travelogue. That form is the step that actually creates it — see "Naming it" below.

b. Buy one as a present

On the checkout page press AS A GIFT. Four boxes appear: their name, your name, a line to be printed on the ticket in handwriting, and their email — which is optional.

• With their email: they are sent the ticket. The subject line will read "<your name> has issued you a ticket", or "You have been issued a ticket" if you left the From box empty.
• Without their email: nothing is sent. You get a ticket you print, fold into a card, and hand over. The code on it is the whole thing — whoever holds it can start the journey.

None of the four gift boxes is compulsory. Leave them all blank and you will buy a real, working, completely anonymous ticket whose "Bearer" and "Issued by" lines print as a dash. Fill them in.

c. A free link somebody posted

A link shaped /p/something gives away a fixed number of travelogues. Open it, see how many are left, make an account (email, a password of at least 8 characters), and press CLAIM MINE. One per person.

These links only work in lower case. /p/holiday24 works; /p/HOLIDAY24 quietly shows the homepage instead.

d. A gift link somebody texted you

A long link shaped /g/<a-long-string>. It shows who sent it and their note, asks you to make an account, and hands the journey straight over. No email address needs to change hands.

Naming it — the step that creates the travelogue

However you got your ticket, you end at the same short form. It asks for three things and they all matter.

2 Your log book

Your travelogue has two addresses and it is worth learning the difference now.

You do not have to remember the second one. When you create the travelogue you land in it, and if you have an account, /me lists every travelogue you own with an EDIT button beside it.

Getting in

The log book asks for your passphrase. If you have an email account on the site there is a second button, SIGN IN WITH AN ACCOUNT, which skips the passphrase entirely.

The tour

The log book is one long page of boxes, top to bottom:

1. The status card — is the journey live, and how long has it been quiet.
2. Look & feel — the four looks, and a live preview.
3. What appears on the page — nine switches for the sections readers see.
4. Closer-in views — extra detail pages for knots of nearby stops.
5. Who can edit it — attaching the travelogue to your account.
6. Link preview — the picture that shows when you paste the link.
7. Who can see it — the visitor passcode.
8. How you travel — invent your own ways of getting about.
9. Log a moment — the form you use every day.
10. The manifest — everything you have logged, with edit and remove.

Boxes 2 to 8 are set-up. You touch them once, at the start, and then forget them. Boxes 9 and 10 are the actual job. Scroll straight past everything else.

3 Logging your first moment

A moment — also called a stop — is one entry. The whole travelogue is nothing but a list of them. The form has eight boxes and exactly one of them is required.

Fill in what you have and press ADD TO THE ROUTE. The form empties itself and a small muted line appears beside the button: ✓ Logged · 12 stops · 4,318 mi. That is your confirmation. (It is brown, not green — do not go hunting for a green tick.)

Getting the pin on the map without typing numbers

Type the place name first, then press the small red link under the coordinate boxes: look up coordinates from the place name. It fills both boxes for you and reports back — looking…, then found — check the pin after saving, or not found — enter coordinates manually.

Take its advice and check the pin. It takes the first search result, so "Springfield" will land somewhere confident and wrong. The lookup asks OpenStreetMap directly from your browser, so it can also be blocked or offline, in which case you type the numbers by hand.

A moment with no coordinates is still perfectly valid. It appears in the log, the calendar and the itinerary — it just never appears on the map, and its card is stamped NO FIX.

"How you got here" means how you arrived

This is the one that everybody gets backwards. The travel mode belongs to the stop you arrived at, and it styles the line running into it. To make the flight from Seattle to Tokyo look like a flight, set Plane on the Tokyo stop.

Each mode draws differently: a plane arcs like a great circle, a car stays nearly straight, walking is a dotted trail — because a car arcing over the Pacific would be a lie about how you travelled. Leave the box alone and the leg is drawn in the plane style by default.

Fixing and deleting

Every row of The manifest at the bottom of the log book has two small words at its right-hand end.

• edit scrolls you back up to the same form with everything filled in. The button becomes SAVE CHANGES. You can change anything, including clearing the date or the coordinates by emptying the boxes.
• remove deletes the moment immediately.

One small trap: if you choose a photo, change your mind, and then press edit on a different moment, that photo is still sitting in the picker and will be attached to the moment you are now editing. Press cancel first — it clears everything, including the file.

4 Photos

One photo per moment, attached through the Log a moment form. There is no gallery, no bulk upload, and no album — a photograph only ever exists as part of a moment.

When you save, your own browser quietly makes a small copy as well — 160 pixels on its longest side — and sends both. The full-size original is what appears in the big card on your page. The small copy is what gets stuck onto the calendar squares and the map pins, so a page with forty photos still opens quickly.

Where a photo turns up

• In the log — full width inside that moment's card.
• On the calendar — as a little tilted polaroid on that day's square. Up to two per day, plus a count if there were more.
• On the map — as a tilted snapshot standing in for the pin, but only if the moment also has coordinates.

Limits worth knowing: 8 MB for a moment's photo, and formats JPEG, PNG, WebP or GIF. The separate Link preview picture (chapter 7) has different rules again: 6 MB, and no GIF.

5 Time, and how the page knows where you are

The line at the top of your public page — CURRENTLY AT — BANGKOK · NEXT LEG — CHIANG MAI — is not something you set. It is worked out. The rule is one sentence:

The current stop is the last moment in your list whose date and time have already passed.

Everything before it is the past, everything after it is the future, and the page lays itself out in those three sections: The route so far, Present position, Still to come. You never arrange them.

Which means the top line has exactly four things it can say:

The clocks at the top of the page

When a reader is in a different hour from you, a small row of clocks appears under your trip statistics: where you are, where you are heading next (marked · next), where you set out from (marked · started), and you — meaning whoever is reading. Each shows the current time there, and if it is a different calendar day it says which day.

They appear only when there is something to say. On a trip that never leaves one timezone, or for a reader who happens to be in the same hour as the traveller, the row is not drawn at all — two identical clocks side by side is a puzzle, not information. Zones are merged by the offset they are on today, so daylight saving is handled for you.

This is the answer to "is it a reasonable hour to call them?" — which is the question the people reading your travelogue are actually asking.

Countdowns

Every future moment shows how long until it happens. The very next one ticks live, every second, in a dashed red box: in 3d 4h 5m, or in 2h 15m 03s once it is under a day. At zero it reads happening now.

The page works out the tense once, when it loads. So on a tab you have left open, the countdown will reach zero but the card will not move sections and the top line will still name the old place until you reload.

Why "Distance traveled" looks too small

It deliberately stops counting at where you are now. Legs you have typed in for next week are drawn on the map but not added to the total, because the number means "how far so far", not "how far in the end". Days out works the same way: first moment to current moment.

Note also that the log book's ✓ Logged · N stops tally counts every moment including undated ones and sums all the miles, so it will be a bigger number than the public page shows. Neither is broken.

6 Making it look like you

The Look & feel box offers four tiles.

Choosing Custom opens nine colour pickers named in plain English — Page, Cards, Rules, Text, Quiet text, The route, You are here, Ornament, Unknowns — four typeface menus, and a choice of how the map is tinted (Aged chart, Night, Plain). Colours stream into the preview as you drag them.

Two small surprises. The Plain theme deliberately removes the wax share seal and the compass rose — they are not broken, they are period costume that Plain does not wear. And the compass rose also disappears by itself on a geographically small trip, when the map is showing less than about a degree and a half of the world.

Turning parts of the page off

What appears on the page is nine tick-boxes, each with a plain-English hint:

Underneath: which side the itinerary sits on, how tall the map is (Short, Normal, Tall), and arrows that reorder three blocks — the map, the closer-in views and the calendar. Only those three move; the header, the itinerary and the log are fixed.

Turning off The map also removes the Replay button, because the button lives inside the map.

Closer-in views

When several moments sit almost on top of each other, the site makes them their own detail page so that a week in one city is readable instead of seven pins in a pile. It does this for you: any group of stops within 60 km of each other, at least two of them, at most six groups, each named after the first stop's place name.

To take over, type a name in Closer-in views, tick the moments that belong in it, and press ADD THIS VIEW. Be aware this is all-or-nothing: adding one view of your own switches the automatic grouping off completely. Delete every one of yours to get it back.

Inventing a way to travel

The How you travel box lets you add your own. Give it a name (up to 28 characters), an emoji, a line style — Solid, Dashed, Dotted, Dash-dot, Ticked, Beaded — and how much it curves: Follows the ground, Curves a little, Arcs like a flight. Press ADD IT and dogsledding appears in the drop-down on the writing form.

If you later delete a custom mode, the moments that used it keep working but their legs quietly redraw in the plane style. Re-create it with the same name to get it back.

7 Sharing it — and keeping it private

Your page is public to anyone who has the link. It is not listed in a directory and nothing points at it, but it is not secret either. Sharing it is just sending the address.

The wax seal

On the public page, the card for the moment you are at right now carries a red wax seal marked SHARE. On a phone it opens the normal share sheet; on a computer it copies the address and a small black bar slides up saying link copied.

The seal only exists once your trip has actually started, because it is attached to the "Present position" card. Before your first moment's time has passed there is no seal — copy the address out of the browser bar instead.

The picture people see when you paste the link

The Link preview box controls the thumbnail that appears when your address is dropped into a text message, Facebook or Slack. Left alone it picks the photo of the moment you are currently at. To fix it to one picture, use Or upload one, choose a wide image (roughly 1200×630 works best; JPEG, PNG or WebP up to 6 MB) and press USE THIS.

Or pick one you have already posted from the Use a photo from the trip drop-down and press the same button. Wide pictures work best because that is the shape a message app crops to.

Putting a passcode on it

Who can see it is the privacy switch. Type a code of at least 4 characters and press LOCK THE PAGE. Visitors then need that code to read anything, your photographs are locked with the page, the data behind it is locked too, and search engines are asked to stay away.

Two passwords, doing opposite jobs

Attaching the travelogue to an account

If you created the travelogue before you had an account, sign in, come back to the log book, and press ATTACH THIS TRAVELOGUE TO MY ACCOUNT in the Who can edit it box. After that it appears at /me and the passphrase becomes a spare key rather than the only one. You can attach other people's accounts too, and each has a small × to remove them again.

8 Worked examples

Four real situations and exactly what to type.

9 When you get home

Closing the journey

At the top of your log book, THE JOURNEY HAS ENDED marks the trip finished. It asks first, and the message explains rather than warns, because this is not deletion:

The page stays exactly where it is and everyone keeps their link — it just stops taking edits. You can reopen it any time.

That is exactly true. Nothing is removed, the address still works, and your readers see no difference at all — there is no "this trip has ended" banner. Only you can tell. REOPEN THE JOURNEY undoes it, as often as you like.

Taking a copy you keep forever

Add /keepsake to the end of your public address:

the-places-you-will-go.com/sites/your-name/keepsake

Your browser downloads a single zip. Inside is index.html, a README.txt, and a photos folder containing every full-size original exactly as you uploaded it, under tidy numbered names like 003-bangkok-chatuchak-market.jpg. Double-click index.html and the whole travelogue opens — title, statistics, a drawn route chart, the itinerary and every entry with its photograph — with no internet, no account and no map service involved. Nothing in it phones home.

Do this at the end of every trip, and once in the middle of a long one.

Deleting things

Individual moments go with remove, which takes their photographs with them. There is no button anywhere that deletes a whole travelogue, an account, or all your photographs at once — for that, or for a copy of your data, email seansp@saasaas.llc from the address on your account.

10 When something goes wrong

Report it from the log book

A small oval button marked ⚑ Report a bug is pinned to the bottom-right corner of your log book. Press it and describe what happened; the "what happened" box is the only required one. You can attach a screenshot with the file picker, or simply take a screenshot and press Ctrl+V / Cmd+V with the panel open.

Above the buttons is a small grey strip beginning Sending with: — that is exactly what is being attached besides your words: the page address, your travelogue's name, your window size, your browser, your time zone, the page you came from, and the last few script errors. Not your cookies, not your data, and no automatic photograph of your screen.

Press SEND IT and you get a number back: Thank you — logged as #41. Write it down — it is your only reference, no acknowledgement email is sent, and quoting it later is the fastest way to be found.

Messages you might meet, and what they mean

Things that look broken and are not

• The page jumps a few seconds after loading. On the first visit it scrolls itself down to the current moment. Deliberate.
• The route animation will not replay on reload. It runs once per browser session. Use ↻ REPLAY THE ROUTE under the map.
• Scrolling over the map does not zoom it. Also deliberate, so readers can scroll past. Use the + and − buttons, or pinch.
• "Read the map plainly" seems to do nothing. On the Plain theme there is no aging to strip, so the button has nothing to remove.
• Your email never arrived. "If a ticket is waiting for that address, it is on its way again" is said whether or not anything was found — deliberately, so strangers cannot discover who has an account here. A silent inbox may mean there was nothing to send. Check the address you actually used.
• "remove" does nothing. The journey is closed. Reopen it first — the refusal is unfortunately invisible.

Everything else

There is no chat, no phone number and no ticketing system — just seansp@saasaas.llc. Deleting a travelogue, getting a copy of your data, a payment that went wrong, or a passphrase you cannot recover all go there. Email from the address on your account and quote your travelogue's name.

The words this site uses

Travelogue

Your whole trip page. One trip, one travelogue, one address.

Moment / stop

One entry: a place, usually a time, usually a photo, some words. The same thing under two names — "moment" in the log book, "stop" on the map.

Log book

Your private writing page at /admin/your-name.

Manifest

The list of your moments in order. In the log book it is the editing list; on the public page it is the itinerary table down the side.

Ticket

What buying gets you. The right to create a travelogue. Printable, giftable, and marked "issued to bearer".

Token

An unspent ticket sitting in your account. (Confusingly, "token" also means the long secret string in a link — you will only see that in an address bar.)

Bearer

Whoever is holding the ticket. The site never checks identity — holding the code is the permission.

Site name / slug

The short lower-case word in your web address.

Passphrase

Your password for one travelogue's log book.

Passcode

The optional code visitors need to read a private page. A different thing entirely.

Dispatch

The all-caps status line under your title.

Leg

The drawn line between two consecutive moments. Its style comes from the travel mode on the moment it arrives at.

Bow

How much a leg curves. Flights arc; walking stays flat.

No fix

A moment with no coordinates. It exists everywhere except the map.

Undated

A moment with no date. It sits under "Not on the route" and is excluded from the timeline.

Origin / home

The one moment you tick as where the journey starts.

Closer in

A zoomed-in detail page for a knot of nearby moments.

Stamp

The rubber-stamp badges on a card: PRESENT POSITION, PROVISIONAL, UNDATED, NO FIX.

Seal

The red wax button marked SHARE.

Chit

The little paper tag on a leg showing its distance.

Route card

The site's own name for your public page.

Keepsake

Two things: the zip you can download and keep forever, and what a closed journey becomes.

Live / closed

Live takes new writing. Closed does not. Same address, same readers, nothing deleted, and reversible.

One-page reference

Tear this bit out.

Now go somewhere and write it down.

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