Confused about trips and blogs and other Q's

Hi,

Do I need to, or should I, set all the travels I am going to blog about as "trips" first? Can this be done retrospectively?

My plan is to manually move previous blog entries and photos from several past sites (TravelArk.org, offexploring.com ) to Travellers Point but I don't want to begin at the beginning (2005!) when I first started blogging.

First of all I want to do the most recent stories and pics (2 years worth and as yet unpublished) that aren't on any site. The old ones prior can, at this stage, still be accessed on the internet. After I post the last few years of travel, and get completely up to date, then, as I have time, I would work on manually copying and pasting the previous ones to Travellerspoint. The end goal is to have all the travels since 2005 in chronological order in the one blog.

Can I use the one blog (Travelwithless) or would it work better to make a new blog for each year (e.g. "2023 Travelwithless" "2024 Travelwithless" etc. to get it chronologically correct?

One more question! re turning blogs into printed books - I have done this with both Travelpod and offexploring in the past, and was able to just choose the blogs I wanted so was able to make one book for each year of travel. Can I do this with "Into Real Pages"?
Thanks!

Quoting Travelwithless

Do I need to, or should I, set all the travels I am going to blog about as "trips" first? Can this be done retrospectively?

It's entirely up to you. All systems - blog, trips and photos - are independently useful, but they all integrate as well. This is primarily done by date.

You can denote blog entries as spanning a time period, and if you have a trip with a stop within that date range, they'll automatically link back and forth. (And thus, yes, you can do so retrospectively.) Same with photos - if you indicate their location and date, they'll automatically show up with the trip stop they belong to.

Additionally, you can manually insert a view on your trip into any blog post, and of course manually insert photos into blog posts as well.

Quoting Travelwithless

Can I use the one blog (Travelwithless) or would it work better to make a new blog for each year (e.g. "2023 Travelwithless" "2024 Travelwithless" etc. to get it chronologically correct?

I think this primarily depends on the type of audience you expect to have, and how/if they'll follow updates. If you expect people to subscribe through your blog (either through a feed reader, or through email), it makes sense to have only a single blog. Particularly if you expect to blog about future trips while on the road. This is the usecase travellerspoint was originally set up for.
But there are lots of people who do one blog per trip, and that's just supported as well. It means a bit less effort to get all blog posts to show up in the order you want them to, and a bit more effort for your regular readers.

Quoting Travelwithless

One more question! re turning blogs into printed books - I have done this with both Travelpod and offexploring in the past, and was able to just choose the blogs I wanted so was able to make one book for each year of travel. Can I do this with "Into Real Pages"?

I have never done this myself, but yes, that does sound like what the integration with Into Real Pages is there for. I expect that one of the members here with personal experience should be along and be able to tell you more about this.

N.B. Many years ago, I wrote this Guide to the site, which might be helpful with getting you oriented a bit more on what all is possible? I last updated it a year ago, so it should be relatively current (though Peter's been busy with adding new features).

[ Edit: Edited on 23 Feb 2025, 10:24 GMT by Sander ]

thank you Sander, much appreciated!

My blogs start out as text emails to my family. One each day. I don't put them into blogs while I am traveling. (Some do) I find it easier to make the trip on the map first so that I have the map at the head of each chapter with the appropriate dates.

When I joined TP I had a lot of previous travel to add blogs for. So I did each individual trip separately but each trip in a single year had the same color on the map, and because I am old and have done a lot of traveling and I didn't enter the trips in date order, I put dates in the blog title. Even if you enter the dates properly when you do the trip and the blog, the individual trips and blogs will not sort in date order - they will be in the order that you enter them. You can order individual chapters within the blogs but not the overall list of blogs.

I linked each blog backward and forward - that is in the first line of the first chapter I had an html link to the previous blog, and in the last chapter I had a link to the next blog at the end of the chapter