So, if you don’t follow site updates through Twitter or Facebook – and who can blame you? – and you’re relying on these blog entries which are typically only picked up by the WordPress reader – like you’re some kind of weirdo; and a hearty congratulations! – then here’s the usual news covering the latest changes to the site and the newest travel content posted. Plus some ponderings on the social side of the internet because it’s a subject I like to lean back into every now and then and tut about.
Site Changes
I finally got tired of the teal/aqua shade that was prevalent on the site. I’d originally picked it because I wanted to not go down the old, tired, blue look which has dominated previous incarnations of this website over the (gulp) decades. But I’ve changed my mind and blue is back. It’s the link text colour and the menu bar colour and even the site icon has been tweaked in colour to match it too.
I’ve also changed the main header image on the landing page of the site now. There’s only so long I can stick with the same one before it becomes a little boring. I’ve tried using a carousel to freshen things up but it just ends up adding in delay time on loading that I’m not happy with, and what sort of insane asylum escapee sits there looking at website carousels anyway? That landing page image is currently the one below and in case you’re interested then it’s a view from our balcony while leaving the Nicaraguan port of San Juan del Sur in 2019.
I’m contemplating removing the Cruise and Travel Feeds page (edit: done) or possibly changing it to a simple static list of recommended sites. The problem is that a lot of the sites I originally set it up to aggregate content from just don’t post very regularly at the moment. Those that do seem to heavily regurgitate press releases or put up their opinion on the same subject everyone’s talking about so there’s just not enough good quality, original content there and a lot of repetition is creeping in. It’s a shame that so many of the travel bloggers I’ve followed can’t seem to find something to write about and keep their sites going during this time of enforced lockdown, and I know there are a number of good reasons for it but it’s disappointing. I know I’m lucky in that I have a wealth of content from a lot of travelling to still write about and that I haven’t ever limited myself to a tight niche such as cruising tips but it’s never too late for people to expand or pivot.
New Travel Content, Revisited Travel Content
The new travel content on this site since the previous update includes genuinely new content (both new as in recent(ish) travel that’s not been covered yet and new as in travels that may have taken place a long time ago but haven’t been written about on this site yet) as well as the reason for the title of this post, some revisiting of older, previously-published, travel content. That means either a complete rewrite with new and/or reprocessed photographs or an embellishment to previous content by splitting what was already there into two pieces of content.
Incidentally, and as I mentioned in the last blog post, this revisiting of old posts is incredibly therapeutic and I highly recommend it if you have a travel site of your own.
The series of travelogue blogs covering our cruise from Italy through the Suez Canal to Jordan and the ancient city of Petra has come to an end (well, unless I revisit this too at some later point). The final two posts include details of our hiking descent from the Monastery at Petra (with a surprise discovery at the bottom) and our final hours onboard Marella Discovery and our flight departure from Aqaba, Jordan (and a surprise on the plane there). It was a cruise holiday full of surprises.
I’ve started filling out our first cruise’s posts which has meant reprocessed photos, more of them, and more detail for the following posts in and around Beijing:
- Beijing, Great Wall Sheraton Hotel
- The Beijing National Aquatics Centre, Water Cube
- Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium, Beijing
This section of content covering China’s capital during our 2008 visit now also has a separate post detailing what I can remember of the Beijing Restaurants we visited. Which is admittedly not a lot. Other blog posts from our Asia honeymoon cruise will be similarly revisited over the coming months.
Not content to simply revisit our first cruise I’m also revisiting the second cruise at the same time so that updates on this site aren’t all about the same subject every post. I covered some of this in the last blog too but updates and additions to our Norwegian fjords cruise in 2013 on Crown Princess now includes a dedicated post for the portion of the cruise between Hellesylt and Geiranger along the Geriangerfjord, while what was a single post that included that bit of cruising along with details of the excursion we took is now solely concentrated on the hike behind the waterfall at Geiranger. Both posts have more information than was previously published and both have more and freshly-processed photos to please your eyeballs.
There have been two other portfolio entries on this website since the last update. The first is a small selection of macro photographs of plants because photography is part of this site’s remit. The second piece is a write-up of a visit to Blenheim Palace gardens and grounds from 2011. Some very interesting history there.
Travel Content Elsewhere
Well, there’s not a lot worth linking to for a few reasons.
Firstly, nobody really cares. I can track clicks to visits to other sites from this one and I can see what gets clicked on and what doesn’t. Nobody who’s searching on the net really cares about these links. There is still that aspect that linking to related content is a good thing but my experience is that other travel bloggers only really want inbound links and seem incredibly reluctant to form a connected web for casual browsers to discover gems. People don’t really seem to fall down internet rabbit holes any longer and there comes a time when if all you’re doing is linking out and if the number of people following those links is microscopic plus nobody’s linking to you so you can’t even be stumbled upon by an interested traveller then you may as well not bother. But I’m old school so I might still keep it up like some cave-dwelling hermit that people instinctively stay away from. My mind changes like the weather.
Secondly, there’s the aforementioned reason that new written content is hard to come by at the moment and while I still watch videos that are released by travel bloggers they’re not something I really want to link to any longer unless they’re spectacularly interesting or closely connected to what I’m writing about as I am still at heart a words-first blogger. If it was easy to search for videos based on spoken words then that would be something but part of the reason I’m not too keen on videos as a primary source of information is how do you find “that video I saw once where someone said the price of shellfish at the restaurant was high,” for instance? If travel vloggers transcribed and tagged their videos as posts on their websites that would be bloody useful because while you can, for instance, read the transcript of a video that has captions or subtitles you can’t actually search for phrases contained there on the hosting platform. Which is stupid but indicative of the walled garden approach and anti-open-web approach so many companies use on the internet.
P&O Oceana Cruise Ship Review is something that’s been published by Paul and Carole and almost falls into that category of transcription of videos I was talking about. Also, as mentioned before on this site, Oceana interests us as she’s the same class as a ship we’re due to cruise on next year. Assuming there is a next year. If they cancel that cruise on us too then I may just destroy next year.
Broadmarsh Coastal Park isn’t elsewhere because it’s on this site, as well as being fairly local to where we live. I’m only including it here because for some unfathomable reason it’s become the most-visited page on this site over the last couple of months. The pictures on the post are rubbish and there’s practically no useful information; it’s a prime candidate for a rewrite and yet people keep searching for it and visiting for some reason. Weird.
There have been a couple of Twitter daily hashtag events I’ve been taking part in over the last couple of months.
April saw #AlphabetAdventures and you can see all the places from just us in this thread: https://twitter.com/MandMsTravels/status/1255042488420663297
Through joining in with that I was invited to a Twitter group chat to try something similar but expanded out from just purely travel destinations to include businesses and even people in the travel industry to recommend each day. That can be found under the current #MayIRecommendA2Z tag if you’re so inclined to check it out.
That’s it for another blog update. The main image is from our hike in Geiranger and represents the uphill struggle that is 2020 when you can’t travel anywhere or something. I don’t know.