My cousin Marcie and her husband Dave are headed out next year on their own sailing venture. Today we had one of those "small world" moments when she emailed to tell me that she and her husband just bought Neko's sister ship Following Tides. There are only eleven Switch 51 Catamarans in existence. They've been exchanging email with Pete on Neko discussing the purchase. What are the odds that while we were buddy boating with Neko my cousin would unbeknownst to us be emailing them?
Marcie asked me how I blog and what system I use. So I thought that might make for an interesting post. So this one is for you Marcie. And anyone else who might be curious...
I use a system called Jigsy. So go to www.jigsy.com and create a free account. It will be obvious how to use the system. Its stupid simple - trust me here - no instructions needed. Its a super cool "what you see is what you get" style interface. Using your free account you can see if you like the system. There are a couple of limitations to the free account that you will have to decide if you are ok with. If the limitations don't matter to you, then you may be able to make due with the free account forever. Otherwise you will want to consider the paid account for $99/yr.
Limitation #1 - Storage Space - Most of the storage space you will use will be for pictures in the blog. The free account comes with 50MB. The average size of the pictures I have posted thus far to the site is 35.5KB (more about picture processing later), so the free storage space will get you about 1400 pictures. In the past 19 months, I've posted 1900 pictures. But I blog a lot. And I put up a lot of pictures. One option would be to use the free account, and if/when you run out of space then upgrade to the paid account which has unlimited storage space.
Limitation #2 - Domain/URL name - You are limited to using the Jigsy domain name for your website. The free URL will be formatted as: mywebsitename.jigsy.com. So Marcie might want followingtides.jigsy.com which would be no problem. Alternatively if you want your URL to be www.followingtides.com (no Jigsy in the name) then you have to get a paid Jigsy account and you have to pay for the URL itself which costs $10/yr. All depends whether you care or not - totally a personal choice.
Limitation #3 - Number of Web Pages - The free account is limited to 7 webpages. Our SV Apsaras site has 5 pages (Home, Boat, Calendar, Projects, and Contact). So if you don't want much more than that in your website, 7 pages you get with the free account should be fine.
Paid Account - We have a paid account but then I have a number of websites I use Jigsy to publish - Limerick Properties, Melissa's Chocolates, DeLong Consulting, and of course this SV Apsaras website.
Picture Processing - Ok, so you've now created your free account at Jigsy, you've designed your website (trust me if you start now you'll have it done in like 30 minutes). You want to put some pictures in your blog post. It will be obvious how to load them into the blog using Jigsy. However, before you load the pictures to your website, you need to reduce their size. The reason the pictures on our website average 35.5KB is because I reduce the size of each one before I publish it. My camera takes pictures at full resolution so they are 1MB each before I process them. This is way to big for two reasons: (1) uploading large pictures to the website takes forever (remember often when sailing you will be on a very slow cellular data connection) and (2) large images will make your website blog run very slowly. So to optimize performance, you want to reduce the pictures to a reasonable size. I use Microsoft Office picture tool to do this. I open the picture, save a copy (so I have the original full format picture in case I ever needed it for something else like printed format), then crop it, then use the compress picture feature (see screen shot below) that lets me select compression for "web pages". Always crop before you compress because otherwise the picture will end up the size of your thumbnail.
Cameras - For the trip we decided we needed a good SLR camera. We bought the Canon EOS Rebel T3i because Consumer Reports said it was the best buy at the time. We bought it with the 18-55 MM lens. I debated getting a telephoto lens for it. The guy who sold me the camera said I probably wouldn't want it for taking pictures aboard the boat because the camera takes such great pictures that you can crop a photo and zoom in on what you want to highlight. He was right about that. But I've regretted not having it for the inland trips because I really should have had it to take pictures of the wildlife. Birds and such just don't get the same level of clarity by zooming in on a picture taken from a distance. Be sure to get a dry bag for the camera like this one. And be sure to purchase a relatively good but small waterproof camera that will fit in your pocket. There have been numerous places I wouldn't take the expensive Canon camera - too much risk of damage, or simply because it was too bulky.
Newsletter Publication - For the monthly newsletter, I use a system called Mail Chimp. Its free. And like Jigsy, super easy to use. First you will go create a list of people - call it "monthly newsletter". Add the email addresses for everyone you know who will want to get the newsletter. This is a good thing to do if you have a little spare time now as for several months you will say to yourself "oops - I forgot so-and-so". There is a bulk upload feature if you can get your email system to spit out a list of emails with first and last names. Mail Chimp will also give you a bit of HTML code that you can add to your website in Jigsy that allows people who go to your website to sign up for the newsletter. (If you don't know what HTML code is - don't worry - email me and I will send detailed instructions for this item which is a bit obscure.) If you go to our website and look on the right hand side, you will see "Mailing List" with a box for people to put in their own email address. I am surprised how many people I don't know who have signed up for the newsletter.
Then you will use Mail Chimp to create what they call an email campaign. Again its a super easy interface - lets you add text and pictures and so forth. To get all the blog links embedded, I typically write the text using Microsoft word, and then use their hyperlink feature to embed all the links. Then I just cut/paste the text with the links right into the body of the email template in Mail Chimp. Mail Chimp lets you send test emails so you can look and make sure that when it arrives your email will look like you want it to. After you send everyone the email, Mail Chimp has reports you can view to tell you who all has read your email, and which links they clicked on. Every time I send the newsletter I am always entertained by watching the reports to see who actually reads it.