Wanderlost!

Finally! After a few years of constant travel, I've decided to create a blog on a travel-oriented blogging platform. After wandering through posterous, wordpress, blogger and blogspot, I was ready to settle with either Wordpress+widgets, or Travelpod. I really like Wordpress for all its simplicity and features, but I don't like widgets too much as they often break on version upgrades, and you would potentially lose all the data related to that widget. Travelpod, on the other hand, offers all the tools any travelers would need except layout customization. And I'm sorry to say, I find the Travelpod layout ugly. The pages are too cluttered, with too much text surrounding the actual post - title banners, maps, author info, links, ads... It just takes away from the actual content of your post. I would be willing to pay for it if it meant I could write my own CSS, but nowhere on the website does it mention anything about layout customization for the account upgrade. I took 5 minutes to look for it, and that was it. If it takes more than 5 minutes to find such an information on your website then it's not worth my money, especially in this age where simplicity is so highly stressed about.

Travelpod is the perfect example of a platform built by a bunch of smart engineers who could write up nifty function and features but who did not put the care and consideration of creating something nice to use. Sigh!

So for now, I'll stick with Travellerspoint. Sure, the maps may not work as well as Travelpod, and there may not be as many bells and whistles... but I like the simplicity and clean look of the blogs. Hopefully in a couple of months we'll see even better platforms coming up on the market!