The thing I’m looking forward to most about my fast approaching trip is my almost complete lack of plans. I’ve got a one way ticket to Manila and have to be in Beijing for the Olympics but everything in between is up in the air.

One of the things I want to do for sure this time around is volunteer. This is something I’ve never really made time for during my past travels for whatever reason (ie. too much time spent at the pub) and I think if I can find the right opportunity (ie. no religious affiliations and no ‘admin’ fees) then I’ll jump at it.

Well it looks like I’ve found it in an organisation I mentioned in a previous post. Hands On Disaster Relief offer support to communities that have been affected by environmental disasters. It looks like they’ve done some great work so far working on a handful of projects and a new one is starting on January 5th in Bangladesh to help out communities ravaged by a major cyclone.

Well I want to volunteer and I want this trip to be an adventure and I really cant think of many places more adventurous than Bangladesh! So I’ve been in touch and I’m doing some research about visas and flights and if all goes to plan I’ll be rocking up in Dhaka, Bangladesh in mid February to get my hands dirty and hopefully be a helpful part of a team of interesting people.

I’m all for this and will do it for sure barring any visa problems but the problem I’m faced with is a lack of internet access for my entire time there. The village they’re in has no connection so I won’t be able to add any new content or monitor my sites in any way for six to eight weeks. Plus I’ll be working six days a week and will probably be too knackered to write content for my sites. So in web publishing terms, going to Bangladesh will be two months of career suicide!

But it will be a hell of an experience and I’m willing to abandon my sites for a couple months… how many businesses can you even think about doing that with? It might cost me but even if it does I doubt very much that I’ll regret my choice!

Happy New Year guys, here’s to an exciting 2008 for us all!

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After seemingly endless months of stashing away money and attempting to top up my savings only to see it squandered at the pub, I’ve finally reached my savings goal! Even better, I’ve somehow managed to beat it.

My goal was to have $13,000 saved by the end of the year and it looks like I’ve beat that by a bit. In my mind, for better or worse, that means that Ive got a bit of money to burn. All of a sudden, buying annoying travel insurance and stocking up on dodgy malaria pills isn’t as annoying as it would have been had I not reached my goal. It looks like I’ll be able to make those irritating purchased without having to drop below my minimum savings.

I love the feeling of having ‘extra’ money. Who doesn’t! I know I could just whack more money into my savings account instead of buying little extras but it’s never as painful making these purchases when I’ve already reached my goals.

With that in mind, I’m thinking I might aim to set a spending budget for each month I’m away. If I can manage to come in under budget for the month then I’ll have money to splurge on something fun at the end of it and if I can’t stick to it then… well I don’t know but I’ll give myself a kick up the arse.

I anticipate that I’ll be able to earn $1200 a month at least so I might set that as my budget for the first month. I’ve already paid for my accommodation for the Ati-Atihan festival where room prices are steep for that weekend. I’ve also paid for an internal flight to get me there so I think $300 a week is a pretty generous backpacker budget for a month in The Philippines.

Sorry I’ve been so lazy with my posts lately. I’ve been working hard on all the things I want to get done before I leave on January 7th and it seems like there’s a lot more than I thought! Plus it’s pretty easy to get caught up in the laziness of the holiday season. Hope everyone had a nice Xmas!

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I have to admit that I think this self employment thing is for me. I think my boss might be a bit soft though. She lets me sleep in until 11am, take long lunch breaks surf the internet far to often, and knock off early. I’m making up for it though by working on the weekend so maybe she’s not a total pushover.

I quit my regular job last Wednesday and on Thursday morning, my first day of freedom, I was woken up at 6am by the sounds of a yapping Chihuahua running down the street and my stressed out housemate chasing it, Benny Hill style, trying to get the thing back inside. The first thing I did was laugh, the second thing I did was glance over at my clock to see how much longer I could sleep for before getting up for work. It took a few minutes for it to register that I didn’t have to get up for work at all and it was a damn fine feeling, let me tell ya!

I’m just over a week into working for myself and, while I haven’t really managed to get much done, I am making a bit of progress here and there. I don’t feel so bad about having those wasted days where I spend all my time working on something complicated, accomplish nothing but learn a few new things in the process. In the past, I didn’t have time to mess about with this sort of stuff but now I can see the benefits behind the learning and if I have to waste a day or two then it’s not the big deal it used to be because I’ll have plenty of time the next day to get things done.

I’ve got until January 7th before heading off on my travels and I’m going to set a few goals here so I know what I need to get done before I go.

• Build Wanderstruck.com - This will be my regular travel blog as well as a travel magazine type site and I want to have it up and running by the time I leave so I can update it on the road without any hassles. So far Ive been tweaking a theme and have learned a lot of CSS but there are some things I want to do that are a bit tricky and that has me worried.
• Sort out my revenue an expenses and get an accountant - I’m avoiding this but it needs to be done. Sorting out my revenue will be easy but I’m not sure what I can count towards my expenses, especially once I hit the road, and that’s where the accountant comes in. I’m hoping it’ll just involve a day or two of research and a couple emails or phone calls. Once I get this figure out it’ll be a big weight off.
• Finish my working holidays site - I have a lot of books here at home that will help me with research for this site. I won’t be carting them around with me so that means Id better get cracking and finish this thing finally.
• Transfer hosts for one of my sites - I need to move a site from Powweb to Dreamhost to save myself $100 when my hosting needs to be renewed in February. This isn’t the sort of thing I’ll want to do when I’m travelling so I need to set aside a few hours to do this. I also need to add Server Side Includes into this site to make updating easier. I’ll probably kll the forum as well because it’s a pain in my arse so I’ll need to use the info in the posts to write up some more articles.

I asked my boss and she says I can have the week around Xmas off so I’ll have a lot to cram in after the holidays. If I can’t manage a post between now and then, have a good Santa day!

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I know, I know… I’m supposed to be working on cleaning up my old sites, adding new content to them and making them easier to update when I’m on the road. Plus I should really be using this time to look a bit further into some tax issues and maybe even learn a bit more CSS. What am I doing instead? I’m doing what I love to do - building a new site from scratch.

This is my favourite thing about web development and now that I’ve got a great new domain in Wanderstruck.com, I’m pretty eager to get all creative on its ass. I thought it might be useful to know what sorts of things go through my head at this stage and how I go from a blank canvas to the beginnings of a website.

• Get a list of potential categories - Before I can decide on layout or navigation I need to have a rough idea of how I’m going to organise things. In this case the site will be a travel magazine, guide and blog combo so I’ll need bits for feature articles, static guides, a blog bit and a travel map that will tie into the blog. As time goes on I will alter this list by combining certain categories or taking things away altogether but I need to have a few major areas defined before I can move on.
• Look at similar sites - At this point I’ll have a look at other sites that might be similar to what I have in mind and see if they’re doing anything interesting that might fit well with my site idea. I’m not saying copy other sites, but checking to see how they’re organised usually gives me a lot of ideas on how I’d like to arrange my own content. I usually see lots of good ideas and think of ways to improve upon them or adapt them to fit with my ideas. I do this with as many other sites as you can and eventually I start to get my head around a navigation system to use. This is also a good way to see if there are any categories I missed out on that might fit well with the content I want to offer.
• Develop a navigation system - This is actually one of my favourite things to do which is surprising to me because it’s really just a paper exercise. I think having a logical, intuitive navigation system is very important and if I can’t get it right from the start it can be a nightmare to fix later on so I put a lot of time into this. At this point I should have a list of major categories and some minor stuff too like ‘about’, ‘contact’, ‘advertising’ etc. I’ll have an idea of how I want the major sections to interact with one another and will start doing some sketches with lines shooting all over the place and navigation lists popping up everywhere. After this point I will have a good idea about my layout.
• Design the layout - This has nothing to do with the actual aesthetics of the site. It’s about defining sections and where chunks of information will go on each page. It’s closely tied in with the navigation and I’ll tend to change bits of both and juggle things around to come up with a design and navigation that work together.

To me this is where a website is really made. I will get a shell of a site up and test it before any graphics or content are even created. This used to be pretty straightforward back when I was building sites using only HTML but now I want to kick things up a notch. In the past, once all these steps were finished I would just build the site with HTML. Now, I know I’m going to have hours of wrestling with Wordpress and CSS to get things exactly how I want them.

This is something I need to learn anyways and I’m sort of looking forward to and dreading the challenge all at the same time. Wish me luck!

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Before I started earning anything online I was pretty tight with my cash. Back in 2001 when I first started doing this as a hobby I was already shelling out about $20 a month in hosting fees and $35 a year for my domain. I figured that was enough for something that, at the time, held no promise of financial return.

But once I was able to cover my expenses and started earning more, my wallet suddenly loosened up a bit and I found myself putting most of my earnings back into my sites.

Website things I spend money on:

• Domain names - If I think of a good name and it’s available then I’ll be all over it! Back when they cost $35/year each with Network Solutions (I was getting ripped off by them up until a year ago) it wasn’t really possible. Now with them under a tenner it makes snapping them up a lot ess painful.
• Advertising - Ill keep this short because it’s a bit taboo but I will buy *ahem* links if I come across a great site with a good price. Not something I do a lot but if I see a good deal then I will. Havent in a while though. Honest.
• Articles - I’ve recently started buying London area guides for ten quid per area which I think is a total bargain. I could probably do some research and come up with guides myself but it would take ages and would never be as good as someone with first hand knowledge. This is something I’m going to do a lot more of in the future because I think first hand experiences make a site a lot more useful and interesting.
• Programming - I got a guy to do my London price guide for $20 initially then another $25 to re-jig it a bit. I think this was money well spent and I know enough about how it works to be able to adapt it to other sites. Having the idea is the hard part because it seems like these guys can make almost anything happen. Obviously, the more complicated the idea the more it will cost but it’s nice to know that there are people out there who will be able to put any big ideas into action.

Stuff I don’t spend money on but will at some point:

• Website design - My favourite part about building sites is, well, the building of the sites. I like sketching out the designs, tinkering with the colours and layout and experimenting until I find something I like. That’s ok with HTML sites but I’ve started thinking about using Content Management Systems (CMS) like Wordpress and Joomla to make managing my sites easier and that’s where things start to get a bit over my head. Paying someone to set something up for me will make sense if I ever want a site that’s a bit more complicated than I can handle myself.
• Nerd books - So far I haven’t had any time to learn new things but I’m thinking that will change once I find myself in Beijing without a ‘real’ job. I’d like to read up on CSS and PHP for sure at some point as well as general web design and SEO stuff.
• Logo design - This is another thing I really like doing myself but I can never seem to achieve the same professional finish that the experts can. I’m still a sucker for a site with a great overall look and I wouldn’t be against buying a logo to complete that look on my sites.

Most of my web earnings head straight into my Paypal account and all of my spending comes from it as well. It’s a lot easier to spend money that I never see and even easier to spend it knowing that it has been earned my sites in the first place.

So if you find yourself with a couple of sales and a bit of money in your Paypal account, have a think of ways you might be able to invest your earnings back into your site. Don’t blow it, but don’t be stingy either. If you make some smart buys it is sure to pay off later.

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I hadn’t really thought at all about backing up any of my computers until my desktop started showing me a screen that I think might be related to the blue screen of death. To this day I still haven’t got a clue what was wrong with it except that it decided not to work for three days and was eventually miraculously cured after I gave it a rest for a day.

I had a few years worth of photos, all of my websites, and plenty of other goodies on there so I have to admit that having dodgy screens show up mae me a bit nervous and I suddenly started rethinking my lack of a backup system.

Around the same time I stumbled onto this post about travel gadgets that mentioned the Seagate Free Agent GO (an plenty of other nerdy goodies). It was exactly what I wasn’t looking for but should have been and I ordered one of the 160 gig bad boys. I was going to go with an 80 gig one because my websites really don’t take up much space at all. But then I figured I could load the sucker up with music and will also need some serious space for all those wonder photos I’m bound to take so decided to go the whole hog.

I think I paid about 70 quid online and it was delivered in a few days. It’s saved my life since coming home because I forgot to buy a UK to Canada plug adaptor for my laptop. I’ve been able to copy all my files to the hard drive, including the install files for Photoshop, and have pretty much been working on my parent’s laptop as though it were my own. This will work in net cafes too and that’s where I think the thing is really useful. Sure, backing stuff up is great but being able to plug and play anywhere has so far been really handy.

I’m still a bit nervous because all of my photos are on the drive and nowhere else. I read lots of really good reviews but a couple that said the drive shat itself on them. If that happens and I lose my photos I won’t be impressed so I guess I’d better back up the back up!

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I’m back in Canada and have been for a few days now. I’ve had lots of time to post and work on my sites, but have I? A big fat NO is the answer to that question.

Despite my love of wandering around without any plans or commitments, I really am a bit of a creature of habit. I’ve been working really hard over the past few months in London largely because I’ve had a quiet place to work and was in a routine. Here in Canada I don’t really have an office type space and I’ve found it hard to concentrate. It’s 10:15pm and my parents are asleep and this is the first real chance I’ve had to get some work done.

I’m working from the kitchen table at the moment which isn’t ideal. I might have to clear a space in the basement to hide myself away in for a few hours a day because this isn’t cutting it! Too much going on around me and the fridge is too close and seems to be raided often by me.

I’m going to have to address both of these issues once I start travelling so I might as well try to get used to it before I go. I doubt I’ll ever have anything that resembles a desk until I get an apartment in China and I think there will always be distractions around me no matter where I am. 

So just a heads up that I’m doing my best to get back into a routine. I think I underestimated how difficult that might be. I guess I just assumed that once I’m no longer working I’ll have loads of time to work on my sites. The reality is that I’m easily distracted and if I can’t learn to deal with working in less than ideal situations then I’ll be pretty screwed!

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As slack as I’ve been with blog posting, I’ve been slacker with packing! Not to mention changing my address with various banks and creditcrds, sorting out stuff at work, selling a few more small things, getting my head around UK tax and so on.

Leaving a city you’ve been living in for five years is a bitch. It’s amazing how much crap one person can accumulate, especially one that’s as anti-stuff as I am. Normally I don’t have any problems purging my life of posessions but this time around I seem to have so much that I’m needing quite a few passes with the cull. Add that to my almost nightly boozy antics with work and other friends and the occasional trip into central London to face the horror that is Xmas shopping and I am starting to get more excited about those beaches in The Philippines each day!

So for the moment, the blog posts are scarce, the hangovers are fierce and the packing can throw itself into a bonfire for all I care. I just want to get home to Canada to kick back and enjoy having a lot of time on my hands.

In the meantime, sorry for the lack of quality posts! Things are about to start getting interesting though, I think. I’m really looking forward to my 3 weeks in Canada and am hoping to get a lot done and explore some new moneymaking areas.

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Well I’m off home to Niagara in a week and then three weeks later I’ll be booting around the Philippines with no real plans or destination. Neato.

I’m being good and not leaving my packing until the day before, for once in my life. The bags aren’t packed quite yet, but I’ve sold all my stuff, given most of the rest away, have two bin bags of clothes to donate, and have organised all my electronics gear. I think I’ll do the final pack on Sunday if my inevitable hangover doesn’t try to kill me.

My electronics have me a bit worried because I seem to have a lot of wires appearing from everywhere. Sure, the laptop is the obvious thing but what’s with the zillions of power cords? Nobody told me about the maze of wires I’d be carting around the world with me! Oh well, all part of the fun. If I get bored I can tangle myself up in them and see how fast I can escape.

I’ve snapped a photo of what I think is all the flashpackery gear I’ll be taking with me. It sort of seems scary when it’s laid out on a table but the camera and laptop pack nicely away into the big brown bag at the back and the rest of it will be stored away in my big backpack’s nooks and crannies so I think it’ll be manageable.

So all up here’s what I’ll be taking:

• 12.1″ Laptop
• Laptop protector sleeve
• Mouse
• Earphones (I’ll be buying a small mic at some point as well to Skype)
• 4 gig memory stick that I can’t find the cord for and will surely lose very early on
• Digital SLR
• Kick ass (but heavy) camera lens and another crappy small lens plus spare memory card, a filter and lens hood
• Small camera that fits in my pocket for snaps of drunken tomfoolery and hijinks
• Seagate portable hard drive (160 gigs I think)
• Approximately a kilometer of wires

The funny thing is, I don’t know a damn thing about photography and I’ve got all this flashy kit. I’m a pretty terrible photographer, actually. I’ll have lots of time on my hands though and an interest in it so hopefully I’ll improve. That is if I don’t spill beer on it or lose it in the first week which is a big fear.

It seems like a lot of stuff. If my bag weighs too much I might have to cut down on clothes and do my entire trip topless.

Bring it on! I’m getting excited now.

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I’m thinking that if I want to treat this whole thing like a business I might need to kick up the professionalism a bit. It’s not really by choice because I don’t like stuffy crap like that, but I’ve just been given a kick in the arse by the people at Moneysupermarket.com that has made me rethink a few things.

I posted a couple days ago about the first link sale on my London site and mentioned the name of the company buying the link. I actually thought twice about posting their name and decided to do it anyways because I really want this blog to be up front and give as much information and help to people as possible. I’m thinking that hasn’t been a smart move.

I got an email yesterday from Moneysupermarket.com guy saying that the deal was off. I emailed back to ask why (it’s annoying I had to ask, especially since they’ve already had a link up for several days without any payment) and he went into a spiel about it not being acceptable that the private details of the deal had been made public… blah blah blah… a professional level of privacy is expected… yadda yadda yadda… trust has been lost… etc etc etc.

I really can’t fault them at all for feeling that way but I don’t think my post was particularly evil, really. I’m guessing that someone read my post and innocently contacted them about selling a link of their own, mentioning my post. I wouldn’t expect someone would have read it and thought to rat me out but if that’s the case then you suck.

This has cost me the deal for the London link, and a couple of other links worth £150 for a total of £250. An expensive lesson, but I’m actually happy to have learned it. Unfortunately for this site it means that I won’t be giving details of the companies I deal with anymore, but I think that actually makes sense. If I keep mentioning who is buying links from me then people with similar sites are likely to try their luck too. Common sense is not one of my strong points so I guess I’ve had to learn it the hard way.

I guess the chatty, casual approach isn’t gonna cut it! Time to treat this thing like the business that it is. This email probably isn’t too professional either but I’ve already been bitchslapped by MoneySupermarket and really have nothing to lose. Plus I think it’s a valuable lesson and I don’t want to see anyone else making the same mistake!

Professionalism starts now. No…….. now. Ok, NOW!

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