Our Journey Begins

The physical journey

Today Kaila and I began our trip to Southeast Asia! We have been saving up for this trip for a long time, so it's exciting that the time has finally come! At the end of February, we both quit our jobs (I'm technically on a leave of absence) and moved from Washington, DC back home to Denver, Colorado. Kaila starts grad school in August (also when my leave is over), which gives us about four months of exploring this part of the world. We think we have enough money saved to last us that long, but only time will tell!

This trip is going to be an exercise for us in going with the flow, so we have been trying not to plan too far ahead. We (especially Kaila) have put together a list on Google Maps of potential places we'd like to visit, and we are hoping to add to that list as we travel, making loose plans to connect some of these places a week or two out and tightening the plans as they get closer.

What we know so far is that we are flying into Hanoi, Vietnam and staying in a hostel there for a couple days. Just getting there is a journey! We start with a three hour flight from the Denver International Airport to LAX where we'll have a 2.5 hour layover. The next one from LAX to Seoul Incheon in South Korea is the big one at 13 hours. After another 1.5 hour layover, we have our final flight to Hanoi. The timeline after Hanoi is still uncertain, but maybe one of the nicest parts about exteneded travel is that we can sort of vibe out how long we want to stay in each place.

I came across a web app called TravelMap.net that has been useful in planning out our route, even if the plan right now isn't very granular. The app let's you make a route across any part of the world, adding dates to the destinations and methods of travel between them, all while giving you a custom URL to share the map! You can even add multiple routes, making one of them the homepage for your URL. Our plan is to keep one route as our rough plan, and making another route that shows the places we've visited so far. You can find our route over at gusbus.travelmap.net, but right now this is how our rough plans look:

There will be a lot more about this trip in blog posts in the coming weeks, so for now, off to some nerd shit!

The web journey

I've been wanting to get a blog set up on my website for a while now, so during a time when I want to be logging what I get up has been the perfect motivation. This blog will let me keep a journal that I can attach photos and art to that I can also share with my friends and family!

Writing HTML on an iPad

We decided not to bring a full laptop with us on this trip, so I bought a keyboard for my iPad with the intent of this serving as our computer any time we want to use a device bigger than our phones. I spent the first flight trying to get used to writing HTML on my iPad! I found an app called Working Copy to help out here. The app connects to my GitHub account and has a built in text editor that lets me clone repos, edit files, preview HTML/CSS, and even push changes. Since my website is hosted with GitHub Pages, this means I can now update it from my iPad, including my new blog! The only catch is that the GitHub connectivity requires the "pro" version of the app, which is a one-time payment of $40. I'm using a free 10 day trial right now, so I guess at the end of this I'll have to decide if I want to pay to continue with this workflow. Since I haven't found an alternative and the experience so far has been smooth, I'm considering it! Feels good at least that it would be supporting a single developer who has made a very nice tool.

Setting up the blog

Once we got to LAX and I was able to get on wifi, I followed a nice RSS tutorial to get my RSS feed set up. If you're not familiar with RSS feeds, they're a way to stay up to date with blogs on different websites in a single place. This is done by adding the link to the RSS feed of any blog you'd like to follow in an RSS reader. Every day or so, your reader will check all the sites you've added to see if any of them have any new items (blog posts). The RSS feed I set up for my blog lives over at gusbus.space/feed.xml.

Some thoughts about RSS readers for Android

I've tried a few different readers for Android, and my favorite so far is definitely Feeder. I like this reader best for a few main reasons:

• Notifications for new blog posts
• Import/export a list of your blogs as an OPML file (to load blogs across readers)
• Native viewer, read in the app or in your default browser
• Estimated read time

The only other feature I wish Feeder had that I've seen in other readers is the option to add blogs to categories. This is nice because some blogs may post more frequently than others, so separating by category can be as easy way to make sure you're not missing posts from less frequently updated blogs. I like the way the Aggregator and Twine do this nicely, although I'm not a big fan of Twine's interface.

The other readers I've tried are Feedly and Inoreader, although I wasn't a big fan of either of these. Mostly because I felt they overcomplicated the RSS reader concept, in part by requiring an account to be made before adding any feeds. This could make it easier to catch up on your feeds on different devices, but I also couldn't find a way to import a list of feeds via OPML file which was annoying as I loaded each feed manually.

Summary and plans moving forward

Like I said before, my plan for this blog is mostly as a way to journal about some of the things on our trip in a way that lets me add photos I take and art I make along the way, with a bonus of making it share-able. I imagine in future posts I imagine in the near future I will be writing more about food and bugs (and hopefully monkeys) than I will about the blog itself, but I'll always leave a bit of room for meta-ramblings ;)

Thanks for reading!