gone living

greetings from kaikoura, new zealand... quick blog update for all of you:

in order to make it easier for people who like photos to subscribe to just photos, and for people who like just the blog entries to subscribe to only the those, i've broken out Gone Living into two separate RSS feeds. (this means that i've removed the photos from the current Gone Living feed, so be sure to subscribe to the new feed if you liked the photos!)

both feeds are now linked from the front of http://www.goneliving.com, and from there you can subscribe to them via FeedBurner or via email.

hope you like the new feeds!

while spending time fixing up gone living lately, i've changd things around so that instead of photos and text jumbled together into a single feed, i've broken out the text, photos, and (and now videos) into separate feeds. if you're interested in that sort of thing, here are the links to subscribe either via email or your favorite feedreader. subscribe to all three if you'd like the full multimedia experience!

these feeds are all listed on the homepage at http://www.goneliving.com, but i'm also including links below for your reference:

gone living text
XML Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoneLiving
Email Subscription: http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=25824

gone living photos
XML Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoneLivingPhotos
Email Subscription: http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=42691

gone living videos
XML Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoneLivingVideos
Email Subscription: http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=42905

an update to those of who you've been subscribers since the feed first launched -- i've setup permanent redirects from my site's original Atom and RSS feed URLs to my new FeedBurner feed URL (http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoneLiving).

this shouldn't break anything -- if you were subscribed to the old feed address, your feedreader should pickup the new URL automatically. if for any reason this breaks your ability to read the Gone Living feed, please drop me an email so i can fix it. thanks!

to give a little more information about my 'gone living' trip on this site, i've been working on adding some new sections to the site. last night i added my itinerary for the entire year-long trip to the site, along with a very primitive (but handy) nav bar near the top of the page to let you switch between my blog, the itinerary, photos, and videos.

also note i removed the youtube module my homepage in favor of the text link to 'videos'. this is because the youtube website badge is pretty primitive (iframe instead of javascript), and loads thumbnails for *every* video of mine, instead of just a few, so this should make the frontpage of gone living load faster as well. enjoy!

for those of you who are interested in how much stuff it takes to go around the world (at least, in the manner that i wanted to do it -- i could definitely be getting by with FAR less stuff than i'm schlepping around), i've now posted the gone living packing list along with sites where you can buy the same gear if you so desire.

i've created a reading list on the site that covers a lot of the books i read before leaving, as well as books i've been reading on the road, guidebooks i've used, and travel humor books that i've read over the years and still enjoy.

and finally, to answer some of the questions people have had about me and my trip, i've added a short faq as well.

i've also upgraded the blog site to movable type 3.31, which means that the site now has support for features like listing tags for each post (you'll see them at the bottom of each post), improved site search functionality, and spruced-up page templates.

i'm also experimenting with some limited advertising on the site to see if it gets any clicks, to supplement the income from my amazon affiliate program. let me know if this drives you crazy, or if you have any thoughts on better ways to generate a little bit of revenue from the site without damaging the user experience.

thanks to jeremy zawodny for the link in his linkblog -- evidently he liked my statement that "i am proud to announce that i did almost nothing of any value whatsoever today" from my earlier post a lazy russian afternoon.

to further my quest of making obsessive lists that overdocument my trip, i've created a soundtrack page that lists all of the music that i've been listening to on my iPod as i travel around the world. enjoy!

as i previously promised, i've been filling in several gaps in my travelogue on this website. these are entries that i'd previously written on paper, and am now updating in my online site.

since these entries are from several weeks ago, they probably won't appear in my RSS feed on the most current articles on the site.

here are the new entries i've added:
hong kong
macau
the bund sightseeing tunnel (china)
lost filling (china)
global trendwatch: september 2006 (germany)
goa sunset (india)

enjoy!

those of your reading my blog via RSS feed or email subscription may have noticed that my text-only entries were allrunningintonebigpararaph, which isn't the ideal way to read them.

i've now fixed the HTML for all text-only entries in my blog, so in any RSS feed they should now show up correctly. i think something changed in a past movable type upgrade that caused this problem, but whatever the cause was, it's now fixed.

reading all those old entries while fixing the HTML gave me time to reflect... it's hard to believe that i've been travelling for over nine months!

dear gone living readers: i've decided to continue updating this site -- not with additional travel narratives, but with answers to various travel questions that friends ask, and my own tips on how to travel in different places. hope you find the added topics to be useful!