A travel blog without a map is like cake without icing! It’s good, but not as good as it should be. And, sometimes don’t you just want the icing? A travel map can give your readers everything they want to know. Then, if they want more, they can click on a marker and follow the links to your blog posts!
My friend George, of the famous Tioga and George – Vagabonders-Supreme.net travel blog recently sent me an email saying that he watched some of our videos on how to make Google My Maps, and he wanted me to look at the results.
Maps as a Blog Navigation Tool
George has been keeping his travel blog since 2003 and has recently added a map of each year’s journey so you can get an overview. Then, for each marker he links to an appropriate Blog post. The map at the beginning of this article is his 2004 travels, the one below is 2005. 2006 is almost done and, if I know him, he won’t stop until he’s current right thru 2010!
Check out George’s ‘Archives’ page to see how he uses these maps as a navigation tool for his entire blog. These maps are created using Google’s My Maps. See this previous article about making ‘My Maps’: Custom Maps with Google Maps .’ And, the tutorial videos referred to can be found at the Geeks on Tour Google Earth and Maps page. Some are free, some require a membership.
Windows Live Writer
If you want to put a map into a particular blog post, I find Windows Live Writer even easier. Since I started using Live Writer for all my blog post writing (even this one at RV.net) I spend about half the time I used to when I used the native blogging software (Blogger or WordPress.) Here’s a free video showing you how it works:
You don’t need a Blog to use custom maps, but what a great combination! We use Google’s My Maps to add a map of Summer Schedule of RV rallies to our website. And, I’ll bet some of you have even more creative ways of using custom maps. Leave a comment if you have maps to share.
Chris Guld
www.GeeksOnTour.com
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Exposing The Motorhome Insurance SCAM!
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By Lee Thacker
What You Need To Know With Your Motorhome Insurance
Motor homes tend to have a ‘love’, ‘hate’ following, and if you are in the ‘love’ crowd, we now have one more reason to celebrate with cheaper motorhome insurance. How do you insure what is both your car and your home in one? You need to find the insurance that will guard and protect your valuables and your RV Motor Home. What are the tricks? Are there tips? Who has the best rates? The first tip is knowing to get the best rates based on the zip code you call home.
Motorhome Insurance
Dolly
I downloaded Windows Live to get window write, and all of the other junk comes up all the time. Is there a way to just have windows write by itself. I looked at my add/delete programs and it didn’t look like it. Help!
Dolly
Chris Guld
FloridaRon,
If you’re finding WordPress too limited, then you must be on WordPress.com. I believe that self-hosted WordPress is the *most* flexible option available. Blogger is by far the easiest, as well as being very flexible – moreso than WordPress.com. We (GeeksOnTour) just presented a seminar on WordPress, you can download the seminar materials at: http://www.geeksontour.com/files/wordpress.pdf
Ron
Love all the info that you guys put out. Thanks we were looking for a map thingy.
Now we Just wanted to know what blog format you think works best as far as having the most control over content. Placing pics, adding widgets, adding a shopping cart if needed etc. We use Word Press and the more I use it the more I find limits that are hard to deal with. We are now looking at Google’s Blog, but we do not have enough experience to know if we are going in the right direction. We work with http://www.daytonabikeclub.com and http://www.bagitid.com for now. We are ready to move them to something that will make our blog life a bit better.
We have learned a great deal from you and hope this makes sense.
We RV about 3-4 months a year. Thanks FloridaRon
JJ Dippel
I would appreciate a mention of my blog, if you haven’t mentioned it already.
I blog about RV’ing without a tow car. I do mine a little differently. It’s organized by subject, not dates.