eLearning Service

Shortly before my friend and associate Jean Kent left on vacation, I mentioned OffExploring travel blog here.   Jean took advantage of the free site and I really enjoyed following her postings, photos and videos throughout her trip.  She was kind enough to review the travel blog service for us below:

     During a recent two week trip to London, England and Uppsala, Sweden, I used OffExploring.com to document and share my travel adventures with family and friends. I really enjoyed the process of blogging my trip – I know I’ll remember more about the places I saw and things I did because I wrote about them every evening.  If you’re planning a trip and will be traveling with a computer and a digital camera, I highly recommend keeping a travel blog.

     OffExploring is a free and easy to use blog service. You can add photos and videos along with your blog entries. Your visitors can leave you messages and send emails to you from the site. Each feature (photos, videos, blog entries, etc.) of your blog is equipped with a RSS feed so family and friends can get automatic updates on your whereabouts. I got good feedback from everyone who visited my travel blog.

     Overall my experience with OffExploring was very positive.  They have unlimited storage space for photos and will automatically crop and resize them for you, too.  I took short videos with my still digital camera (they support most video file formats) but ran into a 50 MB file size limitation the first time I tried to add one to my blog. I ended up converting the videos to WMV using Windows MovieMaker (free but an extra step that might discourage less savvy computer users than I am) before uploading them to my blog. For some reason, a few of my videos didn’t appear after I uploaded them so I had to delete them and try again.

     I didn’t take advantage of a few of the features like making updates with a mobile phone or loading all my email contacts to the site. Out of curiosity I checked into purchasing a printed travel journal which would have been 19 pages and cost £24.99. Too expensive for my budget so I’ll have to hope that the site stays live for a few months.

     OffExploring is compatible with Facebook and doesn’t insert any advertising into your blog. While I haven’t used other travel blog sites, I can say that OffExploring served me well and I would definitely use it again.

     Curious about my travels? Please visit my travel blog here and feel free to leave me a message, too.

     Jean Kent