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Which Blogger to Use

Over the last twelve years of teaching and travel writing I have used WordPress, Google Blogger and a bespoke content management system. However, in 2020 I have come back to Google Blogger. Sometimes called Blogspot, and branded in orange. The key reason was the ease of managing the blogging package. Google Blogger releases me from lots of administration so that I can devote time to writing. More and more web users have a free Gmail account, or they can open one easily, and this means that they share a common environment with Travel Writers Online magazine. For example, here they can check quickly which blogs they follow, hopefully adding this one to their list. Please click on orange image below. You will need to select and copy our url to paste-in, it is

https://travelwritersonline.blogspot.com

Google’s blogspot offer is free and you can be up and running with your own weblog in less than 15 minutes. Of course, you need a free Google Account which you will already have if you use Gmail. Use Chrome as your browser and Sign In to Google in top right of screen. Your own avatar should appear top right if you are logged in.

Then search for the Blogger start page

blogger.com

Let’s call your new blog site

Portfolio

Google Blogger gives you the chance to paste-in or type-in your new blog name, but then checks to see if that name is already taken. Be ready, then, to amend it slightly to be unique. The system then adds a suffix to the end of your chosen name, with the 2 words blogspot com. You can see it in this blog's url if you glance up to the address box at the top of this screen now.

Be ready, too, with some text to paste-in to form the content of your first post. Use this text, if you want to make progress, just highlight, copy and paste from below:

Draft holding post. First post coming soon. Please Follow this blog for updates + + +.

Notice that I do not call a post a page. In the blogosphere, pages are static and sit behind the live regular postings. My only page is called About, and I have tucked it away in the menu to the right of the running, regular posts.

On the screen for posting, the large orange + sign lets you open a new wordprocessor-style page to start typing your words. I suggest you have a store of ideas for posts, partly worked-up and ready for further development and proof-reading. I used to use MS WORD but in summer '22 I re-discovered Google Keep, and now grab new ideas in Google Keep first, often on the iPhone when out and about. Then I use journaling to develop them, but that is for another post, and is covered in our textbook.

The basic font that Google Blogger offers you always seems small in the live, published posts. I change my font to Open Sans then change size to Medium.

You can insert images with this mountain icon at the top of the compose screen

It lets you pick jpegs and png images from the computer you are on, or from your own albums on Google Photos. Please have a go now. Make your empty travel blog ready for inspiration.

The only other option to work on when you are getting started is your choice of Theme. Very helpfully, Google Blogger has a Travel theme. I suggest selecting that. You will only learn which theme suits your writing after blogging for a few weeks. Google Blogger lets you change your Theme easily at any time without losing your valuable content. And that's it.

Please paste-in your url to the Comments box on this blog here to share the url of your new blog address...

AI Detector

I've been looking at AI Detectors that are now stable and easy to use. The first one to write about is from a company based in Montreal, and so, as you would expect from that bilingual city, it works on English and French texts. It's called Winston AI. The AI detector tells you if written copy is generated by a human or an Artificial Intelligence text generator robot. It uses a graphic sliding scale. The software also detects plagiarism and presents a thorough list of any copied content it has found. As a user of Winston AI you just paste text into the quick scan option. You can upload bigger documents in the following formats: .docx, .pdf, .png and .jpg for the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system to convert to electronic text from scanned documents or pictures. This also works on handwriting like Google Lens and the other handwritten text readers and convertors do. The Winston AI Detector works in projects, this lets you label or title pieces you are examining for plagi...

Imagining Tourists and Tourism Conference Paris

Imagining Tourists and Tourism Conference - Paris 19-21 June 2024 Aims of the Conference The conference aims to explore the links between tourism and fiction, and more precisely to consider tourism and tourists as fictions. It is part of a series of conferences organized since 2011 by researchers from the Universities of Geneva, Panthéon-Sorbonne and Berkeley to explore the links between tourism and the imaginary. The first four meetings had evoked how tourism mobilized imaginaries specific to destination countries, their landscapes, their cultures and their inhabitants. The fifth conference will focus on the imaginary that applies to tourists themselves. Imaginary tourists We will examine how the various actors of tourism, as well as the places and practices of tourism, appear in works of fiction. Literature, cinema, theater, song, advertising, etc., stage tourist configurations, which are sometimes at the very heart of these fictions. Fictional tourists include those invent...

The Space in Mill Bay

Millbay, Saturday 3 August 2024 Samedi. A decade has passed since Sam Ferguson published his question* on the innovative story by André Gide, called, Paludes . In English that book title could be rendered as Swamps, or, Sourpool, perhaps. Plymouth's Sourpool is recorded in 1439 when the town's boundary was fixed during its incorporation as a Devon borough. The record reads ‘between the hill called Windy Ridge – by the bank of the Sourpool – against the north all the way to the great dyke otherwise called the great ditch’. Damp, mossy, ferny, even swampy boundaries blurred the edges of the space we call Millbay today. Paludes occupies a critical point of experimentation in the trajectory of published diary-writing […] exploring the possible relationship of the diary with the literary œuvre, and its capacity for addressing philosophical and aesthetic questions. The pertinence of this experimentation to the modern field of life-writing makes this a suitable moment for anothe...

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