Internet Access
In terms of email and Internet access, each and every country we went to had a lot of Internet cafes (in most of the world, "Internet cafe" is the wrong phrase these days,.. most people call it "Cyber Shop" or "Internet Shop"). I was pleasantly surprised as most cyber shops had Windows XP which made it much easier to manipulate photos and connect the Archos device and Inland multi-card reader through USB ports. Prices around the world for internet access are pretty uniform, ranging from $0.50 per hour to $2 per hour. Beware of cybershops that advertise as LAN houses and Games houses - these cybershops usually have gazillions of 10-year old boys playing Doom against each other and shouting very very loudly all the time! Check out an interesting article on multi-player gaming by Benchmark Capital's Bill Gurley at http://www.abovethecrowd.com/atc/2004/10/the_revolutiona.html.
Blogging
In order to keep our families and friends current with what we were doing on our trip, we decided to keep a blog (i.e. what you are reading right now). At first, we knew nothing about blogging. But slowly, we travelled up the learning curve. Our options roughly split into three categories:
- Register our own website, have it hosted somewhere and then update it remotely. Could utilize licensed software such as Movable Type or use one's own HTML skills. Sounded like too much work and too much potential for things to go wrong.
- Use an all-purpose online blogging service such as Typepad (powered by Movable Type software), Blogger (run by Google) or LiveJournal. I found these to have very professional publishing features plus reasonable pricing ($5 per month). I would have chosen Blogger but for the fact that it didn't seem to have a simple way to upload photos.
- Use a travel-specific blogging service such as TravelPod, LonelyPlanet, VirtualTourist or MyTripJournal.com. I found these lacking professional look & feel and any real travel-specific features. But these sites did have a huge number of people visiting to check up about travel.
I chose option#2 and signed up with Typepad. After setting up the basic framework, it was pretty easy to add new blogs and photos. Two other thing also greatly added to the usefulness of this blog - first, I found a free Internet service called Bloglet which enabled me to have a subscription feature - people could automatically get emails whenever we updated the blog - I had to insert some HTML code from Bloglet into our blog. Second, I found another free Internet service called StatCounter which tracked how many people had visited the site and displayed it on the blog.
We also found a great resource to link to repeatedly - Wikipedia - which is a blogged encylopedia, believe it or not. Blogging has grown exponentially in the past year, so I'm sure there are many other options now.
Email Access
If you haven't already done so, please create an email account on Yahoo! or Hotmail or Gmail or the like that you can access from anywhere. People have a reason to contact you for many reasons and this is the best way to interact with travel agents, hotels, friends etc. in distant countries.
-Dev
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