As a new 'blogger' I must admit I've found parts of it rather tiresome. I started a blog last September to document our trip to Egypt and in particular our visits to various craft producers. Our next visit in less than three weeks time is going to be slightly different as we will be focusing on doing more research into the history of the Garagos Pottery for our book/pamphlet whatever it ends up being - the history of this village is a subject that I find fascinating. However, whilst in Egypt last time I found it really time consuming trying to keep up with a daily blog.
I would try to take time each evening to reflect on the day and type up some notes but this wasn't always possible - plus I was using a netbook which isn't ideal. The other difficulty was getting it uploaded onto the blog as there wasn't always an internet connection - if there was it was usually a really expensive service in the hotel. There certainly wasn't a wireless connection in the village so I used to write the blog in a Word document and then copy and paste into the blog once I got access to wifi.
I also found the internet connection very slow in Egypt and trying to upload photographs let alone videos took forever. When we left Luxor for Cairo there definitely wasn't time to type the blog on a daily basis. We packed so much in and often didn't return to the hotel until late. I did get chance to type some notes first thing in the morning but we were always itching to get out and see more things - the blog was beginning to become a bit of a burden.
I then changed tac and started scribbling notes down as I went along. We spent quite a lot of time in taxi's travelling across Cairo so this gave me time to take in the views and jot down anything that sprung to mind. I returned home with over 20 sheets of A4 paper full of my scribblings - both sides and in a really random order. It has taken me nearly 5 months to finish typing up a blog that covers exactly 14 days of a trip! This isn't down to the amount of text I'd written but down to the lack of time - and sometimes motivation to get it finished. Anyway - two nights ago I did it and feel such a great sense of relief.
Now to be quite honest I was beginning to dread the thought of doing it all over again. However, I think I have come across a solution that may seem quite obvious to many but can't believe I didn't think of before. I recently bought a digital voice recorder to record interviews with Peter's family members about the pottery and also life in Garagos. When I was looking for the voice recorder on Amazon I read a couple of reviews saying that it worked very well with the Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software. I have now looked at the software itself and it looks quite impressive. It comes in at over £100 for the premium version but it seems to offer everything that I need to make blogging a bit more time effective. I do touch type but I still find typing endless pages of text really monotonous. Just upload it onto your computer, tell it to open a Word document and then tell it what to write! Genius! The capabilites of this software looks fantastic - please check out the links to further info though unfortunately the people that tend to upload demo's onto Youtube tend to be less than interesting - this is one of the best ones I could find.
Anyway, I've just bought the software - hopefully it will come next week so I can get to grips with it before we go away. In the meantime, Dragon do this great little free app for the iPhone called Dragon Dictation. you can dictate a message and either email, text, post to Facebook or Twitter without typing a word (maybe pressing the odd button is involved). For anyone with long nails or fat fingers this is an absolute must have. It seems quite accurate - though Peter's attempts with his Egyptian accent were less successful! Give it a go if you haven't already done so!
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/12/08/dragon-dictation-comes-to-the-iphone-wow/