Aghhhhhh!!!. I have no desire to write right now. I have had this blog for 3 months and I had a real breakdown today. I just didn't feel like cooking up content. Anyhow, it reminded me of how I have kept up with it so far. So I will write about that.

I'm a programmer at heart, so I custom wrote this blog on my own. The first thing I did was create the article system and how it worked with the database. Anyhow, I made it do two things in particular.

1. I can save draft copies of my articles that are not viewable by the public until I publish them.
2. I can set the posting time for the articles into the future. If it is in the future, it will not be viewable by the public.

I'm sure both these features are available in the generic blogging applications already.

How Does Drafting Help?

Being able to save draft copies is a great method to brainstorm. Whenever I have an idea for an article, I write the title and save it. I don't need to fill it in, just capture the title and move on.

This has allowed me to create a worksheet of around 50 articles I know I want to write about. When I can't think of a current topic I want to write on, I have no excuse, if I feel like writing, to not fill in the body of the article up with words, pictures, and other brainstorming ideas.

When creating articles, I have tried to break them down more. I have a few that are way too long. My travel articles especially. I try to think of every major point on my trip, put it in its own article, and write as much as I can on it. It gives bite-size manageable writing chunks to work on. When people are trying to find travel information, they often are looking for a specific area anyways and not the 3,000 word essay. This is regardless of the topic as well.

Advance Posting

The advance posting dates is another good one. If I write up quite a few postings, I can stagger them to appear when I want them to. I technically don't have to login to my blog to maintain them. A little more automatic. I am working on a pile of travel articles that I am advance posting for when I am on holidays this summer.

There is another side benefit though. When you feel like writing and the creative juices are flowing, you can whip up a series of articles so that you don't have to on your off days. Then it will be posted without worrying about taking the time to login and do it yourself.

Conclusion

Write in a way that encourages writing. For me, this means being able to create a lot of content when I'm in the mood and be able to post it in the future so that it has a staggered release. Secondly, break it up into manageable chunks. There is nothing that kills motivation more when you know you have a large, time consuming task at hand.

There is something satisfying by publishing an article to the world, so do it frequently.

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Well, I'm selling myself for another blog contest yet again. John Chow is at it again. He wants bloggers to link to his site using the keywords make money on the internet. His attempt to climb the Google results page again. I hope it works for him. I'm sure it will.

If you want to do your own attempt at winning the Zune, you can read about it on his posting: Evil Blog Contest - Win A Microsoft Zune

Why Do I Sell Myself?

Good question. I am only really helping him grandstand now. I would like a Zune and the price for this kind of lottery ticket is only a few minutes of my time. These types of blog contests are popping up everywhere now as bloggers try to get links to increase their Technorati ranking and Google PageRank. No one is really doing them at the level of Chow though. He is aiming for top spot on Google for specific search terms.

The other part of me feels a bit of loyalty to him. I know, it's just blogging and that sounds kind of sick. His site has been a bit of inspiration to a lot of bloggers out there. Plus, there have been a few articles that caused me to add something to my blog or change the way I write.

So when he is trying to do something, I don't mind helping him out. Besides, it gives me some content for today anyways.

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I can't wait for the NHL playoffs this year. There are some seriously good series lined up for the first round. I planned on following Calgary, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Pittsburgh. Luckily, Ottawa and Pittsburgh are playing each other in the first round so I can kill two birds with one stone.

My prediction for the final this year is Buffalo and Anaheim. I'm sure a lot of people are predicting this one. Nashville and Pittsburgh are the two other teams I wouldn't be surprised to go far.

I want to see the Flames go all the way of course, so I better cross my fingers now. They open against the Detroit Red Wings on Thursday night. So if you want to guess what I'm doing on the average night until June (as if you would really care), chances are there is a hockey game somewhere I'm listening to.

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The Galapagos Islands are legendary. We have all heard of Darwin and his theory of evolution. Well it was refined while he was at the Galapagos. It is definitely one of the places you should check out if you are ever in Ecuador. Unfortunately, it isn't cheap.

The amount of wildlife is endless and you will be able to get closer to wildlife here than almost anywhere else you can go.

Getting There

You have to fly. The flight from Quito, Ecuador costs $400US with a connection in Guayaquil. I flew into San Cristobal, only because the main airport in Santa Cruz was under construction. That is where you would most likely fly in when you arrive.

When you arrive, all tourists must pay a $100US entrance fee. I believe they only take cash as well, so make sure to have it on you when you go.

Live Aboard Boats

This is basically the only way to do it. You are not allowed to stay on any of the islands other than San Cristobal, so you will want to be on a live aboard boat.

On my trip, our boat would be anchored during the day offshore of one of the many islands. We would take a small boat to a beach and then begin to look around. Sometimes we were free to roam and occasionally there are defined paths where you can walk along. At night we would get back on the boat, eat dinner, and then set out for the next stop. These islands are not close together really, so you might be traveling for 6 or 7 hours in the night.

My trip was 4 days and 3 nights and was $350US and I was on one of the cheapest boats (the Sulidae in case you are wondering). If you ever see a black, old sailboat, that was me. It must be the only one in service there. This price included food and accommodation. There are no other costs except drinks on the boat and a tip for the crew. So this puts the total cost at $850US per person for 4 days. You can buy the usual souvenirs on San Cristobal as well. This is quite a bit per day if you think about it, but it is the minimum to go experience it if you don't have time.

Word of warning: The sea was rough and the fact they are motoring through the night to get to the next island means an even rougher ride. Trying to sleep was an adventure. If you are someone who gets sea sick easy, take the necessary precautions. Take sea sickness pills, sea bands, ask for sleeping arrangements that might be more suitable. Being near the bottom and the back of the boat results in less motion. I prefer open air feeling so we were at the top and the back and that worked fine for me. Seriously though, I was on the top bed of a bunk bed and I thought I would roll out in the night as the boat went up and down through the swells. Everything that was hung on the walls was on the floor by morning.

Animals

There are animals everywhere. It is really quite amazing. There are not many natural predators so the animals are extremely tame, though they will react if you get too close. Too close means actually touching them. You could literally step over the sea lions on the beach if you wanted. I stepped around half and inch from a large marine iguana and it promptly sneezed or spit a white mucus all over my shoe.

There are many birds (I mean MANY birds), sea lions, whales, dolphins, marine iguanas, lizards, flamingos, sharks, sea turtles, land turtles, rays, variety of fish, and more. I shouldn't bypass the birds really, but there are so many. The more memorable are the albatross and blue footed boobies.

The terrain is interesting as well. I was expecting lush vegetation, but it is actually a dead looking place. Very dry looking and the trees had no leaves in July when I was there. The islands are made from volcanoes and almost look like a barren land. Kind of funny seeing that there is so much life there. If you didn't notice the background in the flamingo photo above, check it out again. Does anything look alive to you?

My Route

In 4 days. I flew into San Cristobal and went by speed boat to Santa Cruz (saw dolphins along the way). This was only because of the airport construction in Santa Cruz.

At Santa Cruz we toured a turtle preservation area. Was quite neat. Saw some monster sized land turtles. I boarded the Sulidae and we motored to Santa María that night. The next day we had two day trips to the island. One in the morning, lunch on the boat while we motored to another side of the island, and then a day trip in the afternoon.

That night we motored to Espagñola. We did two day trips at Espagnola before sailing through the night back to San Cristobal. Boarded our plane and headed home.

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Livingstone, Zambia is home to the Victoria Falls and a starting point for many in Africa. I had the privilege of going there in July of 2006 to kick off my Africa Trip of 2006

Getting There

I flew in to Livingstone on a flight from Johannesburg, South Africa. The flight was reasonable (around $140CA with South African Airways booked on Expedia).

It is a stopping point for many tours though. If you were interested in doing on of the "overland" tours from South Africa up or from Kenya down, you will end up here most likely. The "overland" group I was with was going from Johannesburg, South Africa to Nairobi, Kenya. Some people were doing a split tour and getting off at Livingstone, so that is where I joined.

Prices

If you are expecting it to be cheap, think again. This is a poor country without many resources and completely landlocked. Getting goods in and out is pricy. Gasoline was over $2US a litre and there were not many activities that were under $50US for the day.

Staying There

Outside of town a little ways there are few different lodges. I personally stayed at the Zambezi Waterfront. I call them a "secure campground". Basically, it is a fenced off area along the river with guards. The main office is quite nice with a restaurant, bar, patio, tv room upstairs, and activity booking center all in one building. There are a variety of options for staying there.

• Tents

  You can bring your own tent and just throw it up in an open area. The cost is around $10 a night I believe. The overland tour I was with provided tents and paid our fees (included in the tour price).

• Pre-erected Tents

  

  These are tents that sit on concrete pads. There are beds set up inside on bed frames, a plugin for power, a lamp, and is quite nice actually. They can be locked from the outside too. I had some doubts when I heard about them, but I stayed in one for a night and was pleasantly surprised. Cost was around $25US a night.

  
  

• The Lodge

  I wasn't in them, but I heard they were nothing special (not even a television) and the cost was over $100US a night.

Here is a tip. If you have your own tent, you can check for bugs, and you know it's secure. Buy yourself a small travel lock (so the bar fits through the zipper holes). There is nothing more annoying than having mosquitoes or other bugs when sleeping.

Activities

The activites are not cheap. At least not through the activity booking center at the Zambezi, but I have a feeling all the places are the same. Make sure to do a few when you are there. It is a great place to see a lot.

• Sunset Cruise

  

  Otherwise known as the "booze cruise". This is an all you can eat (and drink) cruise along the Zambezi river. Quite nice. You see a lot of animals actually (or I did) and a beautiful sunset. Perfect way to meet a few people when you arrive and settle in to "tour mode". Here are a few pictures of what we saw.

  
  
  Hippo Yawning
  
  
  Sunset at the End of the Night
  
  
  

• Victoria Falls

  

  The most famous part of the area. These were named after David Livinstone, who was the first European to report them back to Europe. There are quite amazing. Twice as long and twice as high as Niagara Falls to put it into perspective. They can be seen from both Zimbabwe and Zambia.

  The entrance fee isn't much and you go to walking trails to see the falls close up. It will feel like it is raining because of the moisture in the air. Wear decent footwear because the stone path will be slippery and wet. Take some plastic bags for cameras as well and if you have a rain jacket you will need it.

  

  Here is a tip. If you are there close to a full moon, you can go back at night and seen a lunar rainbow in the mist of the falls. Truly amazing, like out of fantasy story book. Check out the photo I took when I was there.

  
  

• Rhino Walk

  

  What is this? There is a wildlife reserve right outside of Livinstone. You can take a guided tour of this park reserve and walk around. Was quite interesting. It is called a Rhino Walk because that is what they guarntee you will see. There are two rhinos living there and trackers find them early in the day and inform your guides where they will be. You can get photos with them. Check out the photo on the left. Can you say "uncomfortably close"?

  I was able to see impala, baboons, wart hogs, african buffalo, rhinos, elephants, zebras, and some other animals I cannot remember.

  Your day includes a meal, a guide, and a guard with a rifle in case some animals get a bit testy. Cost was $75US per person.

  
  

• Elephant Interaction

  Yeah, the names are quite funny. There is facility along the river for elephants that were otherwise going to be culled in Zimbabwe. Basically an informative, zoo like place, but was interesting nonetheless. Afterwards we rafted down the Zambezi back to the Zambezi Waterfront.

• Microlight (Ultralight) Flight

  

  I always wanted to do this. If you don't know what an ultralight is, it is basically a handglider with a motor and propeller. Fits two people and they fly over Victoria Falls and/or the wildlife park. The view is amazing.

  Don't worry, the pilots seem quite capable. It was a South African and an Australian running it when I was there.

  Cost was $80US for a 15 minute flight over one of the areas or $150 for a full half hour over both areas. Here is a tip, if you go early in the morning, it can be quite cold so dress appropriately. They will give you a jumpsuit and helmet. You won't be allowed to take a camera either.

  
  

• Helicopter Flight

  This is similar to the microlight except you get to sit in comfort and take your camera. If you want the amazing view and not stress about safety, this is a good choice. I didn't do it personally, but I heard it was great. The cost is similar to the microlight.

• White Water Rafting

  I didn't do this, but there is white water rafting available. Just a little bit downstream from Victoria Falls the river switchbacks several times before stretching out on the plains going out to the Indian Ocean.

• Bungee Jumping

  Just what your loved ones will want to hear. Bungee jumping from a bridge between Zimbabwe and Zambia over the river. You can still see the falls a short distance away too.

  Can't remember the cost, but I know you need to have a visa for both countries to do it because it is inbetween.

• The Lions

  I didn't do this either, but it is supposed to be super cool. You go over to the Zimbabwe side for this. Basically there is a pride of lions that live at a "lion centre". The price believes their dominant male for the pride is one of the employees.

  You get to learn all about the lions, see them up close, go for a walk with them, and learn a ton about their habits and behaviours. Supposed to be an amazing experience. You walk along and hold their tails as you walk (some behavioural thing). They may even take off and hunt something if they feel inclined.

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I had my first experience renting a car the other day. It was a learning curve to say the least. The prices ranged by quite a bit. I am going to Montreal for the long weekend in May. I rented a car from the morning of May 18th until the evening of May 21st. I was looking for the cheapest economy car available.

I checked a variety of sites including the AMA deals page for their affiliate (Budget) to see if I could get a discount. Here is an outline of what happened.

Compare, Compare, Compare

There was a large variety of prices. The worst was Alamo. Their estimated price online was over $200. The best was Enterprise who came it at $84. Most seem to fall in the $120 to $145 category. Overall, I checked the following companies.

• Budget
• Enterprise
• Alamo
• National Car
• Dollar Car
• Hertz
• Avis

Look For Discounts

There are discounts and coupons galore. It kind of makes them look a bit shady actually. But keep your eyes peeled for a deal. You can enter your membership number for different services, get middle of the week deals, weekend deals, etc. My Enterprise quote had no deals associated it with it though, so don't assume because you have an AMA discount or something else that it has to be the best price.

Have the Online Quote Ready When You Phone

I phoned Enterprise and asked for the exact same quote I had just done online. There quote was $112. When I said I saw a different value online, they said "Hold on, let me check the internet price" and told told me the price was $84 about 2 seconds later.

I think they must have an elevated price when booking on the phone, because it took them no time to give me my internet price when I asked. It saved me almost $30 over the 4 days. They are probably told to quote the first one when someone calls.

Do You Have Insurance Coverage?

Enterprise told me that insurance can be $20 to $30 a day depending on what I wanted. This is pricey, but there are other options.

I had heard the Visa had some coverage if you booked with your Visa card. Unfortunately, mine did not have this feature. You can read more about it at Traveling With Your Visa Card. They have a list of eligible Visa cards on the site as well.

My next step was to look at my BMO Mosaik Mastercard. Sure enough, no coverage. However, for $29/year you can add coverage. This looked appealing. It included coverage for the car and personal injury to relatives (you need to read the details as to how far this extends). Unfortunately, no 3rd party coverage for the guy you run into.

I decided to phone my insurance company for my personal car. Bingo. They had full coverage as if I was driving my own vehicle. 3rd party coverage and my own vehicle coverage. The deductible was the same as my vehicle's.

Bottom line, check with your current insurance provider to see if you are already covered. This can save you a lot of money. If you are getting insurance through the rental company, find out their deductible and how far their coverage extends. If you are booking with your Visa or Mastercard, you might only need 3rd party insurance coverage.

Conclusion

I have yet to make my trip and even drive the car, but I will be sure to fill you in and update this article if there is anything else that comes up.

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My wife and sister-in-law were looking for a hotel in Montreal the other day. If you have read some of my other articles, you will know we are heading there for the May long weekend. They found a few interesting things about Montreal you should know.

Parking

A lot of the hotels charge a fee for parking. It ranged from $10 to $20 a night. This is a little bit and you may want to budget for it in your travel plans.

Prices Online and By Phone Are Different

The prices they found online were cheaper than if they actually phoned the hotel. The hotel would not match it either. They told us to book online, so that is what we did.

This is the same rule of thumb for finding a rental car. You need to do your research online. Find the quotes, make the phone calls, and ask questions. This way you can get the cheapest prices or get yourself into a fancier hotel for the same price.

The Price Isn't Fixed

We did not do this for this trip, but I had a friend do it here in Calgary. The Palliser is one of the nicer Fairmont hotels in downtown Calgary. He was staying there the first weekend of December a couple years ago. He knew the hotel wasn't full, so he approached them and said how much he was willing to pay for a room. They accepted it and he got a room for the price of a 3 star hotel.

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I have seen large number of websites with a sitemap. This is highly recommended by almost every site. I had already created an XML sitemap for Google as outlined in my article Adding a Google Sitemap. However, this is just a page full of links.

There is a link for the sitemap in the side menu. Basically it has a link to all my static pages, my RSS feed, the sitemap itself (with 3 different extensions), and all the blog posting links.

Why Do I Need an HTML Sitemap?

It helps search engines find all the pages on my site. Also, it means that every page on my site is accessible within two clicks. One click to open the sitemap and a second click to open the page. I am hoping for increased search engine traffic from this.

This still isn't automatic for me. I created my own link that I just have to click to regenerate this page, but I will make it automatic in the near future.

I was encouraged by an article I read today called Use An XHTML Sitemap for Better Indexing.

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I tweaked my site again today. All my links to the blog postings now have a title tag in them. What does this mean? It is more data for the search engine to crunch when indexing. If you hover over the link now, you will notice pop up text for each one. The pop up is the same as the title of the link.

This is another attempt to increase my search engine hits on my site. I am realizing more and more that my revenue generating traffic typically comes from the search engines.

Oh yeah, I cleared 100 unique visitors yesterday without doing anything special (other than write these amazing articles, haha). I have done it twice before, but I was part of a Digg on a friend's site. This was just search engine driven traffic and my usual readers. Hopefully my latest tweaks will help push me to even higher heights.

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Trying to get web surfers to stick around is always a battle. You will notice at the bottom of the postings I now have a related postings section. I now list 5 posts that are the most related to the one being read. There is a good chance I have already written another article that a surfer may be interested in.

I think where I placed the 5 related posts section is appropriate. I could put it in the side bar somewhere to try and make it more noticeable, but I'm not sure. I am emulating how John Chow has done his related posts section.

Why Did I Do This

I want more exposure to my articles. My readership is growing and people do not want to take the time to go through the archives looking for content. If they like one of my current articles, then one of the older posts might be of interest to them as well.

Not only do I want to serve them more content to help them out expose my articles, but there is a second big reason for my related posts area.

If I am trying to make money, I should be hoping the user has already left my site because they clicked a link. But the truth of the matter is, they are still on my site and at the bottom of an article. They have already gone past the ads I have set up. If they are going to leave, they will hit the back button and it is back to the Google search page that brought them and they are lost forever.

This is my best guess at the surfer's behavior, because this is what I do. Now, I'm hoping they will see some post titles at the end of the article that interest them and it forces them to take another click and do some more reading. Technically, the loop could be infinite now and they could surf every page in my site.

By including links in your post you also encourage surfers to visit other articles, but it takes a lot of work to go back and maintain older articles. It gets near impossible as your posting count grows. I am over 200 now and don't have the time to go back each post and add in links.

Screenshot of Related Posts Section

Other Techniques

I did not write a post about it, but I had also added the "Category" field at the top and bottom of my posts around a month ago. This is a quick link to this category's index page. From checking my web tracker stats, these have been used on occasion, so I definitely feel they were worth the change.

How Did I Create Related Posts?

I wrote my own blogging software. I would have been better to just go with WordPress, but I am a software engineer, so doing my own programming helps to keep me involved in the blog and give me more stuff to write about. If you are using WordPress, John Chow wrote an article called Two Tweaks to Generate More Blog Traffic about the plug-in he used.

I used a handy little query option in MySQL. It is the MATCH AGAINST syntax. If you want to have a MySQL search engine, then this would be a quick and dirty way to do it.

Basically, any columns you want to search from a MySQL table should have a FULLTEXT index on them. Then you can use them in your query.

For example: I have a table called posts with the columns title, keywords, and postcontent that have text I want to search. The keywords are a set of strings that I use in my html keywords section for Google to index and I enter them in when I create the post. They are my own description of what the page is about.

After I write out the post content to the page I then do a "related posts" query. It looks like this (in php)

SELECT post_id,title FROM posts WHERE MATCH (title,keywords,postcontent) AGAINST ($keywords) AND post_id<>$current_post_id LIMIT 5

Where $keywords are the keywords for the current post. It can be any string of keywords (without commas, this seems to mess up the search). I also tell the query to not return the current posting (which would always be the number one result). The result will be all the post numbers and titles sorted by correlation descending. I put a LIMIT on there to keep the list small.

It takes the result and creates the links I want on the page. It returns a lot of results, but the top ones are surprisingly closely related. You can even print out the MATCH value to see the number MySQL has calculated as to how closely "related" it is. A number between 0 and 1.

I was thinking if I started a new section where there really wouldn't be any closely related articles that I know of, I could put a limit on what this score can be. For example, only allow ones with a MATCH value over 0.5 or something to that effect. I wouldn't be always showing 5 results if the last few results are a completely different topic. It would take some experimenting to get the results I wanted. I am tempted to try matching against the actual contents of the posting too, but this seems to do the trick for now.

You can read about MATCH and AGAINST on the FullText Search Functions page on the MySQL website.

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