Lone Dodo Travel Primers: Crash Course for Your Trip Ahead
This post shows you how to make your own personal travel guidebook. And what on earth is that? It is a collection of personally-sourced articles about a place you are visiting, with high quality, relevant content.
The reasoning: Guidebooks are often indispensable sources of information when traveling…they have maps, reviews of businesses, restaurants…much more too. But, they are not updated, and they are not personal. And, they are not free! We tried out creating our own guide to see what kind of things travelers can learn using the web. An example of one of our guidebooks on Bali can be found HERE.
The goal: Finding high quality, highly relevant content to guide your travel plans.
The method: Use search engines and a little elbow grease to find content that guidebooks might overlook.
The ingredients: A netbook, Ipad or Laptop; An Amazon Kindle, a computer-to-Kindle app.
Note: Some of you might not be up for finding this useful. If you do, don’t sweat it please, just tell us how to improve it. Cheers!
The reasoning: Guidebooks are often indispensable sources of information when traveling…they have maps, reviews of businesses, restaurants…much more too. But, they are not updated, and they are not personal. And, they are not free! We tried out creating our own guide to see what kind of things travelers can learn using the web. An example of one of our guidebooks on Bali can be found HERE.
The goal: Finding high quality, highly relevant content to guide your travel plans.
The method: Use search engines and a little elbow grease to find content that guidebooks might overlook.
The ingredients: A netbook, Ipad or Laptop; An Amazon Kindle, a computer-to-Kindle app.
Note: Some of you might not be up for finding this useful. If you do, don’t sweat it please, just tell us how to improve it. Cheers!
The 6 Steps to Get The Best, most Customized Travel Guide Online in 60 Minutes
- Step one, pick a country or place that you are planning to visit. Then, go to the following sites and read about the country’s tourist background and country background (5 minutes)
- Once you have chosen some interests/attractions, pick several keywords that correspond to them. Keywords should be prominent, specific qualities or activities related to the place of interest. (5 minutes)
- Match up the activities/qualities with the particular destinations –– like “serene” and “Hawaii” or “bungy” and “Queensland”. (3 minutes)
- If the destination you are visiting is a bit obscure, use more general keywords.
- Now, take the topics that interest you (your keywords). Go to Google. Then, follow this simple rule. Take one, or preferably two of your keywords, type them into Google search, then type “site: xyz.com” where ‘xyz.com’ is a source whose archives you want to search through. (20 minutes)
- Please look to my Primer on Bali for sites we use, and the type of quality content we’ve turned up.
- Example: NYtimes.com. On Google.com type in “surfing Brazil site:nytimes.com”.
- To combine sources to cut down your searches, use the OR separator. Following from the previous example, to include The Guardian news: “surfing Brazil (site:nytimes.com OR site:guardian.co.uk)”. To exclude a keyword like coral use “surfing Brazil -coral (site:nytimes.com). For more complex google searches, email us or use this.
- Locate content you like. Almost always on first two pages of search results.
- Watch video content at your leisure. Send website content to your Kindle (two ways to do this)
- To transfer web content to your Kindle, you can save articles as PDFs (you may need a PDF converted for this: I use doPDF 7 for Windows) and transfer to USB.
- An easier way is to send content to your Kindle via Calibre.
- Magazines, newspapers, and other feature sources to design your own mini-adventures
- Sitting back, and watching Youtube Videos
- Youtube videos have terrible keywords. When you find a relevant video, look for suggestions on the right sidebar, and judge quality by name of video and views
- Popular published content for itineraries, restaurant recs, etc.
- Sources I use: Travel and Leisure; Gadling; ;Outside Online;TripAdvisor; Boots’N'All; Lonely Planet
- I also search for expert, niche tips from geographic specific, themed content.
- You can usually find these by Googling “Best blogs” or “Best sites about XYZ”
- My go-tos in Asia: ActionAsia; EatingAsia
- Follow itineraries of champion bloggers: Almost Fearless: Insightful, personal writing from a family that has passed through 32 countries; Uncornered Market: highly recommended, diligent content from a full-time traveling couple;3X 5: Blog of Chris Guillebeau: Chris learns travel hacking en route to every country in the world; Nomadic Matt: On the road for 2+ years, has quality recommendations, budgeting tips, and concise travel guides himself.
- Look for Direction from other Blogs: Search other blogs (although with questionable content, by using Google blog search and appropriate keywords.
- If we are still in need of answers to questions, we also Google “expat forums” followed by the name of the country I am visiting.
Voila!