Focus On: Travel Blogs

Photo courtesy of Ma.tt.

I love to travel, and when I can’t hit the road, I love to armchair travel. Travel blogs are great for vicarious sightseeing. I’ve noticed that the best travel bloggers all do certain things very well:

• They include photos. Evocative prose is great and all, but we also want to see that stunning vista.
• They don’t include too many photos. Granted, Angkor Wat is amazing, but scrolling through fifty photos of ancient temples? Not so much. Choose a few of the best, and link to the rest.
• They eat. Everybody wants to hear about food (and see pictures of food), especially new and unfamiliar food.
• They give specifics. Even if your readers are unlikely to ever follow in your footsteps, they’ll still want to know: how much was that kebab? What was the name and address of that guesthouse? How long was that train ride?
• They introduce us to interesting people. Even travel stories that would seem to be all about solitude (such as thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail) inevitably include characters. We want to hear about the new friends, the fascinating strangers, the irritating seatmates.
• They educate. They don’t just mention a monument, a tradition, or a custom; they provide history and context. Who built the monument? How did the tradition start? What does the custom symbolize? What does it mean to people today?
• They employ humor. Traveling is all about getting outside your comfort zone, and at times it can be awkward and confusing. Entertaining travel writers see the comedy in every misadventure.
• They focus on what makes their perspective unique. Many people have visited Paris, but everybody sees it differently. Are you a senior traveler, or do you travel with small children? Do you travel with a wheelchair (or with a wheelchair and small children)? Are you an introvert, or a scaredy cat? There are others like you who will be inspired by your example.

Everybody travels. Whether you’re riding a pony through Mongolia, or exploring a new area of your hometown, you’re having an adventure people will want to read about!

Do you have any favorite travel blogs on WordPress.com, and if so, what do you like about them? What tips do you have for making posts about travel interesting or useful to readers?

To find more great travel posts on WordPress.com, try browsing the Travel topic page!

Summer Bloggin’

Last week’s Photo Challenge got me thinking about how much I love the summertime. For many of us, the summer means extra time outdoors, time with friends and family, and traveling adventures. These summertime experiences are great fodder for seasonal post ideas. If it’s summer where you are, consider these summer-themed posts for your blog.

For parents, summer usually means that the kids are home from school, which makes summer the perfect time to blog about your family adventures. Taking a special trip to a park or zoo? How about a family reunion or get together? Taking pictures of these family outings is a great way to document memories and keep your out-of-state friends and family updated on your lives. Similarly, consider a summertime project for a family blog where your kids can learn about the internet, blogging, and making a website.

Summer for students may mean a special internship, project, or travel plans. If you’re embarking on a new summertime adventure, keep a weekly log of your experiences. This way, you can go back and write a summary piece on what you learned from your latest job or volunteer opportunity. For travelers, you can even share with others how to travel on a student budget or develop a personal travel guide.

As the weather warms up, there are often more outdoor festivals and activities. At the beginning of the summer, plot out which events you’d like to go to so they’re on your radar. When the time comes, try live-blogging any festivals or conferences that you go to. Live-blogging means publishing new blog posts while at an event. For example, if you go to a local WordCamp, you can post reviews and notes from each session you attend throughout the day. Live-blogging is great for connecting with other bloggers and bringing traffic to your site. To make the most of your live-blogging experience, make sure you publicize your posts through Twitter using the relevant hashtags and tag your posts.

If you like to relax and enjoy those lazy summer days instead, why not try to make a summer reading list and review each book on your blog?  Whether you’re a beach bum or a camping addict, bring a book with you, take notes, and let others know if it’s A+ beach reading material or if that novel was better off left at home. You can even do this with movies, local summertime events (such as a music series), and art shows.

Do you have any summer blogging tips? Do you cover different topics seasonally?

Mother, Can I?

Photo by Flickr user www.worththewhisk.com

I believe it’s generally known that “can” is the favored verb when asking about whether it’s physically or mentally possible to do a thing and “may” is favored when asking for permission, but there turn out to be some nuances that can be a little confusing. With the help of Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (which I refer to often in these posts), I’ll outline some of the nuances.

First, Garner allows that in speech and informal writing, the distinction is insisted upon only by the “insufferable precisian.” So when blogging informally, feel free to use “can” in place of “may.” In fact, among three caveats Garner offers is one suggesting that over-use of “may” can give your writing a prissy tone.

The other two caveats:

• Use of phrases like “mayn’t I” or “may I not” can be stilted, so it’s fine to use “can’t I” in these cases, even when asking for permission.
• “Can’t” and “cannot” have come to be more common denials of permission than the equivalent “may” phrases. (I would add that using the “can” forms to deny permission seems more emphatic, since it progresses from “no, you may not” to “no, it is not humanly possible.”)

I find it a little curious that Garner says the distinction between the two words is “often advisable” but then lets us off the hook for the ways in which we commonly override the distinction anyway. As with any of these picky little distinctions in English, you’re likely damned by some portion of your readers no matter which choice you make, as the sticklers will scoff if you use “can” where “may” is (prissily) suitable, while readers more comfortable with casual writing may be put off by fussy insistence on “may.” Now, in any case, you’ve heard from the language expert (Garner, not me) what your options are and can may will should <insert your verb of choice here> write accordingly.

If you’re interested in more on “may,” see my entry on the distinction between “may” and “might” here.

A Post for Your Thoughts

We love how active the Daily Post community is. And we know that you have wonderful stories, tips, and resources to share with our community as well.

That’s why we’ve recently added the “Submit a Topic” page to the Daily Post menu. Via the “Submit a Topic” page, you can send us suggestions for new posts or submit your story for any one of our three new series: Why I Blog, Blogger Profiles, and My Morning Coffee.

You can learn more about each of these new post topics here and can access the respective contact forms via the links included on that page. Let us know what you think!

Fun with Formats

Post formats are one of my favorite WordPress features. As microblogging becomes increasingly popular, it can be easy to fall into the trap of saving your long posts for your WordPress.com blog. With post formats, you can choose what type of post you want to publish, giving you the flexibility to share a link, post a status update, or publish a long essay.

So what is a post format? It’s a way of styling your posts according to the post type. On WordPress.com, we have the follow post formats:

• Standard – Your normal, average, everyday blog post. This is the default styling for your theme.
• Gallery – Usually will show a thumbnail from the blog post, as well as an excerpt of what the gallery is about.
• Aside – These are brief snippets of text that aren’t quite whole blog posts. Useful for quick thoughts and anecdotes
• Image — These posts highlight your images
• Status — Short updates about what you’re doing right now.
• Quote — These posts highlight your blockquoted text in a bolder way than standard posts do
• Video — Just like Image posts these posts highlight your videos
• Audio — Just like Image and Video these posts highlight your Audio attachments

From the Post Format support document

Similar to post formats are featured posts. For themes that offer featured posts, you can feature a post by adding a featured image and marking it as sticky. Featuring a post highlights it for your readers. It’s a great way to promote a specific post that you’re particularly proud of or feel is a good representation of your work. For themes with post sliders, featured posts will appear in the slider at the top of the page — just like the Friday Photo Challenges on the Daily Post home page.

You can select your preferred post format via the Format module on your Add New Post page. As an example of how post formats appear differently, take a look at the Twenty Eleven demo page. The first post on the Twenty Eleven demo page is a featured post. As you scroll down, you can also see the Gallery, Image, and Aside format. (In Twenty Eleven, the post format is noted next to the post title.)

If you’ve seen these options on your own blog when writing up a new post, you may have wondered what the benefit is to using post formats. Post formats offer a customizable portion of your site. Instead of waiting to post your “Standard” long post, you can publish a status update or a quick image post. Similarly, post formats keep your home page visually interesting. Each format has it’s own style, so each post looks different.

If you’d like to find themes that support post formats and sliders, head over to the Themes Showcase and filter your search for “Post formats” and “Post sliders.”

If you’re using a theme with post formats, do you use them? If not, do you use any other services for shorter posts and ideas?

Swearing

Photo by Flickr user edwick

It’s a simple fact of life that people swear. If you’re writing fiction about real people, or at least real people of certain fairly common temperaments under some circumstances, you ought to be prepared to write the occasional swear word. Of course, we’re not all writing fiction, and there’ll be many of us writing fiction who stick to “cleaner” topics and characters. Still, I thought swearing might be an interesting topic to bring up.

There are plenty among us who’ll see swearing as a degradation of the language, and there’s a very frequently-used argument that if you must resort to using swear words, your vocabulary must not be very good to begin with. I don’t think it’s a sound argument, but then, I do love to swear, so maybe I’m biased. Comedian and author Stephen Fry has taken up the topic as well and agrees with me, for what it’s worth, noting that many of our writers with the most prodigious vocabularies are also fond of swearing. You can watch a short video here if you’re interested.

So, what do you think? Is swearing an occasional evil necessary for the sake of realsim or is it perhaps even an art in its own right? Or is it something to be avoided at all costs? Let’s keep Erica’s tips about writing about controversy in mind and keep the comments clean no matter the opinions we’re expressing. There is, as they say, a good time and place for everything, and this blog is by and large a family show.