FAQ: If you spend so much time in isolated places, how do you post so often?

I know, I know – I write A LOT. Perhaps the question should be WHY do I post so often ;)  I enjoy writing and the process of going back through our pictures and through the places we have just visited is a way of revisiting and consolidating my memories of those places. The blog is first and foremost, our own personal record, and we’ve already enjoyed going back and re-visiting places by reading old blog posts.

For example, forgotten how cold winter cruising in BC was? Just check out this post on Princess Louisa Inlet!

We occasionally meet people out cruising who have seen our blog (which is usually fun but sometimes awkward and deserves an entirely different post to explore) and they ask how it is that we can post so much with so little internet access.

While offline I write posts regularly. For example, right now I am in Tahanea atoll which is a national park. There are no permanent inhabitants let alone groceries, or cell or internet. Before Tahanea, we were at sea on a 5 day passage. I am anchored all alone in amazing blue water, not a building in sight, sipping my morning coffee in front of our battered hand me down netbook (thanks Dan!) at our nav table, writing.

When we arrive in Fakarava in a few weeks – wait, actually there isn’t internet in the South of Fakarava unless you are using a cell stick which isn’t in the budget so actually when we arrive in the North of Fakarava at the village of Rotoava – I will have maybe a dozen posts waiting to go in Windows Live Writer. Each post will already have been fully formatted offline, with photos also inserted and formatted, and with tags chosen – no need to take up precious internet time/bandwidth trying to get everything right.

Rather than upload those dozen blog posts on a single day, which no one enjoys, I use Bloggers post scheduler to set a date for each post to come out. I do this via the Windows Live Writer program (see below) so I can do it offline but you can schedule posts with the Blogger web interface as well.



You may have noticed that I often use a Monday, Wednesday, Friday pattern, filling up the MWFs until I run out of posts. Often, if I know I will have internet the next day, I take a second to set up the dates of the posts I haven’t uploaded yet so that when we are online I can simply open the first post, hit the publish button, and depending on the quality of the internet and number of photos, wait for a while. When the upload fails, which on sketchy internet happens regularly, I may have to try to upload the post more than once. When it succeeds, I open the second post and…so on.

As I sit here in Tahanea, disconnected from the internet, I know that I have blog posts which I uploaded in Mangareva that have been going up 3 times a week and will continue rolling out for another week. We aren’t likely to be in the village before they run out so there will be a sudden stop and break after the last scheduled post until we arrive.