Africa blogging

When you are cycling up to 120 miles a day, 6 days a week, for 10 weeks, you don’t want to spend your day off sitting in a dark internet cafe waiting for a page to load so you can post to your blog.

Working in a digital media company, you would think i would have spent a fair bit of time deliberating over which blogging tool to use for my big trip to Africa. The reality is that between deciding which bike, which tyres, which tent and what else I needed for the Tour D’Afrique from Ethiopia to Namibia, where to host my blog was the least of my worries. In the end I took a recommendation to use Tumblr, a nice, customisable, pretty site that can post updates to social media sites and looked like it would be ideal. The night before we were due to leave my partner Jerry decided he too would like a blog after all so I hurriedly set him up on Posterous which i’d just seen mentioned on Twitter. The fact you could update it via email seemed a good idea for someone less into blogging, other than that I didn’t give it too much thought.

Living in the west it feels like most of the world is on the internet. The official figures actually stand at around 27%, and in a lot of the world, access is communal, paid for by the minute and often painfully slow. Those users might not be target users for most consumer websites but i can’t help thinking that some of the most interesting bloggers might well be from that demographic – from people with lives completely different from ours, from adventurers in remote destinations, and from general travellers like me that just want to tell their families and friends how they’re getting on, where they have got to, how many elephants crossed their path that day and how bad their saddle sore is.

What i came to realise is that while it is important how pretty your blog looks to anyone reading it, it is far less important to the blogger themselves. Their priority is to be able to simply and quickly post all the types of content they want to from wherever they are. And that was the trouble. I didn’t need the ‘new post’ page to look pretty, i needed it to load quickly and to post what i had written to my blog without timing out. Without even attempting to upload photos or video, the connection was so slow I often couldn’t even post text. When i was able to post it looked beautiful but many times I had to hand over money to an assistant in an internet cafe, grumpy that i had wasted a precious hour and achieved nothing.

Jerry meanwhile was faring much better. We found that using gmail in basic mode to post updates to Posterous worked a treat, even when attaching photos. With both blogs we knew they would look fine so we didn’t need to see the formatting when posting updates. Being able to use basic mode with no images or formatting made the whole process much quicker.

In a lot of places we travelled through, having access to internet at all was a rare occurrence. On the other hand, mobiles were everywhere. More than once i found myself riding towards a Samburu or Masai tribe thinking how life had probably changed little for them for generations, only to see one of them pull out a mobile and sometimes even take a picture of us on it as we rode past. For some near a city there is the possibility of a data connection via their mobile but for many they are still using SMS in ingenious ways – to trade, to transfer money between bank accounts and to get automated information.

And texting is eventually what i went back to, posting regular updates to twitter via SMS and only updating my blog when we reached a city with a half decent connection speed. The photos I reduced down as far as i could and spent a painful 2 hours in Lusaka uploading the best few from each country.

The trip was a fantastic adventure – riding and camping in Africa for 3 months was a wonderful privilege and an experience I will never forget (thanks ComputerLovers!). Between my tweets, hundreds of photos and a handwritten journal I have plenty to jog my memory of the many days that sometimes blend into one. But…if i ever get the chance to do something like this again, i would love a blogging tool that has all the things i was looking for originally like the ability to customise, being simple to use, able to post updates to twitter, facebook etc plus…

• basic mode for slow connections with an emphasis on functionality and speed
• a simple, well designed mobile version of the site
• the ability to post using SMS for when there is no data connection

You can view my blog at vivslack.tumblr.com or check @vivslackafrica on twitter
For more about the Tour D’afrique visit www.tourdafrique.com