Building on the Work-Save-Travel model

This year I travelled to two new countries: Mexico and Ecuador. Besides that, I got a full time job, a house and things like that. That made it difficult to take time off work, but I will make it happen anyway since travelling is the best way to spend money, don’t you agree?

Mexico

I backpacked in Mexico at the beginning of the year, checking out Mexico city and several surrounding areas to the north, west and southern parts of central highlands. Then I travelled to Yucatan to see some spectacular Mayan ruins, returning back with a tan to a snowy Toronto.

Northern Ontario

It was late spring in Toronto but still snow season in the North. I took a bus trip to North Bay, continuing to Timmins, about 700 km away from Toronto. Later in the summer, I also visited Iron Bridge, a little community between Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie on the shores of Lake Huron.

Ecuador

In autumn, I travelled to Ecuador for about a month, spending majority of my time in the mountains and hiking to my heart’s content. I was quite surprised by how geographically diverse the country was and the number of activities one could indulge in.

Life events in Toronto and travel to surrounding areas

This year I bought a house, it’s a 130-year old Victorian house, with ghosts and stuff in the attic. As you can imagine, now I am not only firmly grounded in Toronto but also fully ‘settled down’ with a partner, mortgage, job and things like that. So I was quite busy this summer putting everything together.

Besides lots of cycling to places in Toronto, I also visited Guelph area and made an annual pilgrimage-like trip to Niagara falls / Buffalo, NY.

Detroit, USA

The year ends as I spend christmas holidays with my in-laws in Detroit. Detroit is a nice city but plagued by complex problems which I solely blame on the evil auto industry…haha! Nevertheless, I had a great time walking in the downtown core.

Travel blogging and social media

Besides writing a journal about my travels, I also ventured into social media this year by signing up for Twitter and Facebook and socialising with travel bloggers in general. Since travelling is not my fulltime activity (unfortunately) or a source of income, there is only so much time I could dedicate to social media.

But I’m glad that my twitter network has grown to 965 followers and facebook community has grown to 180. At the same time, I published 91 blog posts this year and my alexa rank has improved from 864k to 240k today. I think I am at equilibrium now, haha!

Oh yes, and I moved my travel blog to a new domain name: finaltransit.com, so please update your bookmarks!

So that’s the summary of my travels this year. How was 2011 for you?

© RSS feed from Final Transit - Priyank's notes from the road.. If you are viewing this content on a website instead of your RSS feed reader, then the website you are on is guilty of stealing my content without permission. Please visit my blog (Final Transit) and let me know so that I can take action against this spam website. Thanks!

I personally rely upon blogs for my source of information, and I often find them more useful than newspapers because blog posts are richly connected with links to other relevant information. With so much quality content freely available, its no wonder that the print media is increasingly sourcing, or stealing, stories, pictures and research from blogs.

In 2008, I was twice a victim of plagiarism, a different Indian newspaper on both occasions. I don’t know how many other incidents occurred after that because I no longer read Indian newspapers avidly. Mridula, one of my blogger friends from India who writes Travel Tales from India was a victim recently. India’s leading national newspaper, The Hindustan Times, stole her picture, cropped the copyright out and published it. Now that they have been caught, they are pleading innocence.

Where do these journalists get their images from? Google images and Flickr are the favorite sites of internet picture pirates. Google Images is an excellent example of how a wonderful tool can be abused. Google images indexes all images it comes across, and makes them publically searchable. Unfortunately this makes people lazy and temps them to steal images.

Here are some tricks I use to reduce the chances of my pictures getting stolen.

1. Removing an image from Google’s index

[From Google Webmaster Help]
I simply ask Google robots NOT to index any image from my website. To do that, you need to edit your robots.txt file.
To remove all the images on your site from Google Images index, add the following directive to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: / 

While this is a guaranteed method, it can be used only by bloggers who control their own servers. For the rest, here’s a workaround that might work.

2. Discouraging Image Alternative Text (ALT tag)

When you add an image to your post through blogger or wordpress, you will be asked to input “Alternate Text” for your image. That’s what I am talking about. First, lets understand why the ALT text is used.

In HTML, the ALT attribute (called Alternative Text) of your IMG (image) tag is used to record alternate text for your picture. This feature is very useful for accessibility based browsing (e.g. for vision-impaired users) or in case your image becomes unavailable. ALT tag was historically used for search engine optimization (SEO) but now thankfully Google ranks it quite low. So the significance of ALT tag has drastically reduced.

So I say, get rid of the habit of filling the ALT tag with useful keywords. For example, in the picture above, I’d have ALT tagged it “Machu Picchu, Inca ruins, Peru”, but now I simply say “image” or “[machu]123(pic chu)” or something like that. That way, you still follow XHTML 1.1 strict compliance, display a somewhat meaningful text in case your image is missing, AND prevent the search engines from indexing your picture in a useful way.

3. Change image file name

Simply call your pictures “4334.jpg” instead of “machu-picchu.jpg”. Remember, the lesser the keywords the search engine sees, the less likely it is going to index your picture prominently.

4. Use a big copyright symbol

Very effective, but aesthetically unpleasant. I refrain from doing that.

None of the above methods have any real impact on the overall page ranking of your website. So go ahead, try them.

© RSS feed from Final Transit - Priyank's notes from the road.. If you are viewing this content on a website instead of your RSS feed reader, then the website you are on is guilty of stealing my content without permission. Please visit my blog (Final Transit) and let me know so that I can take action against this spam website. Thanks!

Fantastic year of travel: Bhutan, Israel, Peru, Russia, USA

I finished my one-year internship and returned back to classes this year. However, that also helped me save up some money and I was able to travel a lot this year. In particular, the second half of 2008 was amaaazing since I moved out and took 3 months off just to travel! Now I have been to 8 countries.

Israel

I started the new year in Tel Aviv, almost at the end of my Israel trip. It was a fun party, ending only at dawn.

Link to my Israel travel stories.

New York City

I got my US visitors visa this year so I was very excited to go to New York City. It’s a fantastic city, almost overwhelming but then I tend to like crowded cities so I enjoyed NYC a lot.

Peru

On a random day in winter, I woke up and lazily looked at the web promo email that Air Canada routinely sends. It’s nothing but a gimmick, but regardless, I ended up booking a flight to Lima, Peru. I had no clue where I was going, or the language, food, safety issues. I think that’s why I enjoyed all the hiking, exploring and getting lost.

Read about my experience of backpacking in Peru.

Killarney Provincial Park

Early summer / late spring was a nice time to visit the Killarney Provincial Park, although I was bitten by black flies all over and came back with lots of souvenirs.

Bike trip to Niagara Falls

Since my roommate and I shared several interests, we embarked upon a legendary 4 day bicycle trip to Niagara falls region. It was a fantastic trip and birthday, and I learned a lot about myself. I also crossed over to Buffalo, USA to get my immigration documents. Somehow I landed on the I-94 which is an interstate highway in USA, and it wasn’t fun!

Russia

Since the cheapest way to go to India was flying Aeroflot, I decided to take more time off work and school to make it a three month trip. I studied Russian which is very important if you want to enjoy the country, and it kept me yearning for more.

Check out my stories from travel in Russia.

Bhutan

Land of the Thunder Dragon, happiest country in the world, hidden deep inside the Himalayas and the only country where having an Indian passport is the best thing that could have happen to you. I was in Bhutan only for 2.5 weeks, but it was enough to see most of the important sights and fall in love with the country.

Bhutan travel stories

India

I spent about 6-7 weeks in India, travelling to Kolkata, taking a road trip to Bangalore and generally hanging out. I was going back after 3 years so it was quite exciting and gave me lot of time to reflect and think things over!

So that’s the summary of my travels this year. How was did the year treat you?

© RSS feed from Final Transit - Priyank's notes from the road.. If you are viewing this content on a website instead of your RSS feed reader, then the website you are on is guilty of stealing my content without permission. Please visit my blog (Final Transit) and let me know so that I can take action against this spam website. Thanks!

I hope I can focus more on my travel writing in this new structure. I won’t migrate the older travel posts on this blog, but just put a link instead.

The links for my blogs are as follows:
Travel blog: http://finaltransit.com/blog
Personal blog: http://priyank.com/weblog

Thanks for staying with me. Russia and Bhutan updates will follow

cheers,
Priyank.

© RSS feed from Final Transit - Priyank's notes from the road.. If you are viewing this content on a website instead of your RSS feed reader, then the website you are on is guilty of stealing my content without permission. Please visit my blog (Final Transit) and let me know so that I can take action against this spam website. Thanks!