Cordy's Blogging Process

It's been almost a two month's break from blogging. Just know that I have not been slacking off. I've actually been doing some photo editing and organising at the background. In order to make that more believable, I thought I'll do an entry on my blogging process before I start on my next travel blog. So for today, let me just show you just how much effort it is to create these blogs. By the way, one of the reason from my leave was I'm back to Singapore and have been adjusting to life here again :)

Let's start! To take a travel blog as an example, after the travelling and all the photo taking is done ( I do edit some photos and throw away junk shots on the go), all the photos that survived has to be transferred to the laptop in order for me to start work on. And since I hate wires, and data is so cheap these days, all the photos (and videos if any) are uploaded to my Dropbox account and downloaded to my MacBook. I've created a specific folder for photo bridge sharing purposed in my Dropbox account just for this. 

All the photos are categorised by year and location upon landing into my laptop. As you can see, there are backlogs that I plan to work on. Above are only the more recent trips! I have more in my hard disk! Raw photos are backup into the hard disk before any photo processing is started. As a person with IT background, we must always Backup! Backup! Backup! Push! Commit!

Next the raw photos are grouped into daily category. Luckily I am also very organised in my travel planning, so I always have an excel of my trip I can refer to. Maybe I'll do a separate blog on how I plan my trips. It has been so BAU now that everything just works via a template. Every trip is almost like a Project Plan for me, with the Project Folder Template, Excel template, and all the finances, broad plan and daily details. Luckily I love planning my travels :P

This is what each folder with their content looks like. Not very meaningful for blogging is it?

So the tedious task of tagging the selected photos I like to be on the blog begins. This is one of the most time consuming task cause it means going through all the hundreds of photos. After selecting the photos, the planning on how it will appear on the blog also starts here, hence the prefic 1xxxxx so that I know this will fall into the first post of that topic. Not all the photos ended up on the blog. Actually most just ends up in my hard disc to die.....

Once the photos are categorised accordingly, each photo is then shrink to less than 1MB of size because I don't like the thought of overwhelming my blog with heavy photos. During the shrinking process, some photo editing and cropping might also be carried out. Hence the original photos are always backup before this process starts. This part of the process can also be quite mechanical and brainless, so I often do this when I feel that I am unproductive but don't feel like doing too much :P

Besides the photos I took, there are also photos that are taken by my travelling companion. These are process next as the volume is a lot lower. Mainly these are whatsapp photos, and sometimes videos. 

Yes videos! Another data hungry file format. These days, I upload them to my YouTube channel, and link them to my blog where applicable. YouTube has become my video storage location. I've though about doing video clips before, but the thought of video editing really tires me off. Besides, I'm more of a word person than moving picture person..... But we'll see how the future goes. For now, I am quite happy just maintaining my blog. It's a great place to visit to see what I've accomplished in life, and also gives me an outlet to share and express myself.  

So now you know the process I go through maintaining this blog. A lot of hours actually goes into it, but it's something I enjoy and don't mind spending my time on. And with that said, I better start on my next Travel blog before the momentum dies down again! Enjoy!