Tim McGiven's Blog, page 34

VideoPress, Take 3

We promised you “more is coming” in our latest update—and now more is here. More features that make the finest video service for WordPress even more powerful. You can upload more content with less effort, reach more audiences, and keep sharing more of what inspires you. In this video, we’ll show you what’s new in VideoPress.

Let’s dive deeper into five of the new features that make VideoPress more powerful than ever:

Higher Resolution Videos up to 4K – Watch crisp images on any display and screen size. We’ve added support for displaying your videos in 1440p and 4K formats. Adaptive Streaming – Videos now play back much faster by automatically adjusting video quality based on bandwidth and display size. The viewer can still choose the quality they’d like in the menu.Progress Bar Color Match – The VideoPress seekbar now adapts its color to match the scenes in your videos. This makes your content really pop.Resumable Video Uploads – You no longer have to restart your uploads if they get cut off for some reason. Simply drag your video into the editor, and the resumable uploader will take it from there, even if a network error occurs.Subtitles, Captions, and Chapters Support – Simply upload your text tracks via the VideoPress block and they will be available on the video as soon as you publish your post.

The most exciting times for video are yet to come. We are committed to keep evolving VideoPress so that you can keep delivering high-quality content, flawlessly and ad-free, to millions of users around the globe.

VideoPress is included in our WordPress Pro Plan on WordPress.com. And if you have a self-hosted site, you can get VideoPress through Jetpack as a standalone product.

Say Hello to WordPrompts!

Earlier this year, we kicked off 2022 with Bloganuary, a daily blogging challenge during the month of January. The feedback we received about the challenge was overwhelmingly positive, and it’s clear that prompts serve as a helpful way to inspire people to write and to connect with other bloggers.

We want to keep that momentum going, so we’re excited to introduce a new set of prompts for creators of all types — whether they participated in Bloganuary or not. Meet WordPrompt, a single-word monthly exercise that aims to inspire you to create new posts, regardless of what or how you publish.

Are you a food blogger sharing recipes? We challenge you to cook up something interesting based on an individual word. 

Are you a photographer with an online portfolio? Show us how the prompt is represented in picture form.

Do you host a podcast or a vlog? We’d love to witness how a single word inspires an episode.

Whatever you publish, we hope you find inspiration in WordPrompts. To join in on the fun, add “WordPrompt” as a tag to your post, allowing your content to be discovered more easily in the Reader, and use the hashtag #WordPrompt when you share your post on social media.

This month’s WordPrompt is:

GREEN

You can find new WordPrompts on our social channels and in our newsletter each month, so be sure to follow us and/or enable the newsletter emails in your account to participate!

TwitterInstagramFacebookLinkedInTikTok

Introducing WordPress Pro: One Plan, Infinite Possibilities

Our mission has always been to democratize publishing, one website at a time. Now we’re making all the benefits of WordPress available to more people, with one simple pricing plan.

Hello, Pro

One thing we heard over the years was how hard it can be to choose the right upgrade plan when you’re ready to scale up from Free. 

WordPress Pro radically simplifies that decision by rolling the very best of managed WordPress hosting into a single, affordable plan at just $15/month (paid annually).

50,000+ Plugins in Your Pocket

Plugins are powerful add-ons that make it simple to add limitless functionality to your website in just a few clicks. No coding necessary. With WordPress Pro we’re opening the doors to this unlimited array of extra features at half the price of our previous Business plan.

A Universe of Beautifully Designed Themes

Along with thousands of free themes available, Pro also unlocks a range of beautiful, Premium themes, with more to come in the future. Whatever your goals, you’ll find a hand-crafted, flexible theme to transform your design in minutes, not months. No designer necessary.

From Site to Store in a Couple of Clicks

If you’re ready to start selling, WordPress Pro includes everything from simple payments, donations, and subscriptions, to full-blown stores. 

WooCommerce – one of the most popular ecommerce platforms on the planet – is baked into your Pro plan. Not only does that bring raw, almost infinitely expandable options to your store, it also means you’ll pay significantly less than those other e-commerce options you see in ads everywhere.

Anytime Support, Any Time You Need It

Sometimes you need a little extra help getting it done. WordPress Pro customers can get a helping, human hand with Premium Support over live chat and email. If you’re stuck, we’re here to get you unstuck.

Managed WordPress Hosting For the Rest of Us

WordPress is all about the right to do it yourself. 

With cheap hosting, or even a Raspberry Pi on your counter, you can put up a site in minutes for pocket change. But you’ll run into hours of hands-on maintenance, quickly hit speed, security, and hosting limits, and spend a significant amount of your time keeping it running. Managed Hosting takes away that pain, but often at a significantly higher price.

WordPress.com and the new WordPress Pro plan aim to give you the raw power, flexibility, and hassle-free experience of Managed Hosting, without the huge price tag that usually comes with it. 

In addition to the headline features of Pro, you’ll get:

Custom domain names without a separate subscriptionSEO features that make your site easy to find.Social media tools to promote your website.Hyper-secure protection from DDOS, brute force, and other attacks that could take your site down overnightSuper-strong, real-time, automated backups spanning multiple locations, so if the worst ever happens, you’re coveredThe fastest site speeds of any managed hosting on the planetSFTP access to your filesAnd much more

That means you’ll enjoy a fast, secure, search optimized site, without having to spend countless hours on updates, fixes, and technical maintenance.

What About Free?

Our Free plan isn’t going away.

It’s important to WordPress.com that anyone, anywhere can put up a blog or a site, whatever their situation. With the Free plan you’ll still be able to get the word out, create a beautiful site, and take advantage of the fastest WordPress managed hosting on the planet. And when you’re ready to scale up your ambitions, WordPress Pro will be waiting in the wings.

How This Affects Your Current Plan

While we’re making a few changes to the Free plan, rest assured that if you’re already signed up, nothing will change for you. Ditto, if you’re on one of our legacy plans, nothing will change unless you want it to.

Going forward, new signups and sites will integrate smoothly into our new Free and Pro plans.

Your Money Goes Further. And Further.

WordPress Pro is more than just a simple, competitive way to enjoy rock-solid, super-fast, hyper secure WordPress hosting without the hassle.

Every dollar you spend on your plan helps us to:

Support WordPress.com Free plan users around the world, whatever their circumstances. This is more important than ever in 2022.Sponsor the work of 90+ dedicated developers working on the free, open source WordPress project as part of the Five for the Future initiative. That helps to ensure that WordPress will always be free, open, hackable, and hostable by anyone.We’re Here For You

We’re listening to your feedback, and want to be clear that it will, as always, shape the future of WordPress.com. 

With that in mind, we’re committing to:

No traffic limits on either the Free or Pro plan. You’ll enjoy the same unlimited traffic you’ve always had.The new Free plan storage limit will include 1GB of Free storage, and existing Free users will keep the 3GB they already have on hand.Additional storage will be available for purchase at a very reasonable price, very soon.As-you-need them add-ons for both plans, to give you a la carte upgrades. Coming soon. 

It’s important that we keep things simple, honest, and clear in everything we do, and we’re looking forward to hearing from you about your plans, feedback, and ideas!

More Questions?

We totally understand that you might have additional questions about the changes. We’ve answered more of your questions in our FAQ here.

WordPress.com Favorites: Empish Thomas

Welcome back to our “WordPress.com Favorites” series! In these interviews, we’ll be highlighting bloggers about their passion project. Caution: contents guaranteed to be inspiring. This interview has been lightly edited.    

Shortly after Empish Thomas earned her journalism degree in the mid-’90s, she began experiencing severe headaches and sensitivity to light. After a visit to the eye doctor, she was diagnosed with uveitis, a generalized eye inflammation that can quickly escalate to permanent damage. Unfortunately, Empish fell into that category, losing her sight fully within a few years. 

Since then, she’s been a writer, journalist, and advocate for blindness and disability rights, telling stories and championing awareness along the way. 

Empish generously took the time to answer a few of my questions and share some ideas on how we can all be better advocates for disability rights.  

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you write about and why? How long have you been blogging?

I am a freelance writer and blogger. I started off as a writer many years ago and later started blogging in 2013. Although I have a journalism degree, I love writing for the pure pleasure of it. I launched my own blog about two years ago as a safe place to write my own thoughts and ideas about things that concerned me. I write especially about my life as a blind person because when I became disabled 20+ years ago, I rarely saw positive and interesting stories about the disabled.

2. What are some of the most common negative portrayals you see about folks with disabilities in the news or in pop culture?

Well, there are actually two things I notice. One is the “superhero crip” image. That is a disabled person overcoming these incredible challenges and doing amazing things that everyone is impressed by. It sends a message that all disabled people are supposed to or want to be that way. It communicates a false expectation. At the end of the day, we are all human beings and live lives like everyone else.

The second one is that we are not visible at all. Many times, I will read a story or watch a news segment and wonder, “Where are the blind people? What is happening to those with disabilities?” This is not necessarily a negative thing, but more [shows our] exclusion from the storyline.

3. Let’s move to the workplace. How can employers become better allies and advocates for disability rights?

First, making sure that disabled employees get their accommodations to perform their jobs. 

Then, providing the support, encouragement, and motivation to help them move upward in the company the way you would an abled-bodied person. Sometimes I think that people with disabilities are not encouraged to move up into management or higher-level positions. It is like people can’t imagine a blind person as a supervisor or director. But with the right support, they could do the job like anyone else.

A Few of Empish’s Favorite Posts:

Working and Writing in the Disability Non-Profit WorldI’ve Become My Own Tech Support When Working From HomeIt’s a White Cane Not a StickMy Laundry Isn’t Smart But I AmMy Blindness Protected Me From the Full Grief and Horror of September 11th4. You’ve mentioned podcasts in a number of blog posts. Do you have any favorite listening experiences to recommend?

Yes, some of my favorite podcasts are HISTORY This Week, LeVar Burton Reads, The Stacking Benjamins, Code Switch, and Grammar Girl. 

5. What can someone do today to be a better advocate for disability rights, especially in the online space?

For me, being a better advocate is learning as much as you can about blindness and visual impairment. Reading things written by disabled people in their own voices. Through my years of writing about the disabled, I have had people reach out to me to learn more and that is a good thing. 

Also, helping those of us with visual disabilities get access to the internet. I can’t begin to tell you the number of websites I go to with accessibility issues. It is a regular challenge. Reaching out to web developers is hard and exhausting sometimes. But having allies to help in this process would be wonderful. It could be a simple thing like bringing awareness, because people don’t think that blind people are online.

6. Do have any tips for aspiring bloggers or freelance writers? 

Depending on the type of blog you are writing, it is so important to be organized. I use an editorial calendar where I jot down blog ideas for each month. I think about things coming up, current events, trending topics, etc., and add them to the calendar. This helps me to keep a good flow of blog posts.

Once people start subscribing they expect to see posts on a regular basis, and having an editorial calendar helps me stay on track.

Want to learn more about being organized and consistent with your writing? Sign up for our free, self-guided Intro to Blogging course today: 

Get Started

Customize Your Entire Site With New Block Themes

In case you missed it, we’ve been rolling out a new set of powerful site design tools called Full Site Editing (or “FSE”) and it’s now available for all WordPress.com users!

Don’t worry if you’re just hearing about Full Site Editing for the first time. We’ve been releasing these new tools in a way that doesn’t actually require you to do anything with your existing site(s). If you are up for a change though, we’re happy to announce the launch of a brand new family of themes made specifically with Full Site Editing features in mind. As of this writing we have over two dozen themes available that support Full Site Editing.

Marl → Hari → Alonso → Stewart → Winkel → Videomaker → Barnett → Livro → Farrow → Bennett → Kingsley → Dorna → Byrne → Geologist → Arbutus → Twenty Twenty-Two → Payton → Baxter → Jackson → Ames → Attar → Russell → Calvin → Baker → Quadrat → Skivers → Zoologist →

These new themes have been designed with a wide variety of sites cases in mind. But their potential stretches well beyond their screenshots and demo sites. Because each theme is fully editable in the Site Editor, every one of these themes can be heavily customized to fit your site’s needs. You can start with theme that features single minimalist homepage, and then add as many menus and sidebars as you wish. Or, you can start with a complex business theme and strip it down to something minimal to suit your vision.

The Site Editor also includes a new feature called “Global Styles,” which allows you to edit site-wide settings for color, typography, and more. You’re free to change your theme’s default color scheme to whatever fits your mood, or even make all site text larger or smaller in a couple of clicks. To kick off this new feature, we’re also providing a few pre-built variations on some of these new themes.

All the new themes and variations can be found in the Theme Showcase. Or, if you’re starting a fresh site, they’ll be offered to you automatically in the site creation flow. This collection of themes is just the beginning, and we’re excited to continue launching a variety of diverse theme options for you. What would you like to see in the next set of themes on WordPress.com?

The Future of Plugin, Themes, and Services Purchases on WordPress.com

Recently we shared that you can now purchase six popular Automattic plugins right from your WordPress.com dashboard. We’re intentionally testing this out with our own products before opening it up to the broader community. This is the first step in our plan to make taking your site to the next level faster, easier, and more flexible than ever before.

But it’s really just the beginning.

What’s coming soon

Today, we’d like to share a vision of what’s coming for instant purchases of plugins, themes, and even services – all from right within your WordPress.com dashboard. This will help you level up your site and make any goal you bring to WordPress.com a reality – with increased ease and convenience. 

Everything you need, one click away

WordPress.com already comes with a suite of powerful, adaptable tools to bring your site, blog, or store to life. On top of those tools, our Business and eCommerce customers have the option of making use of thousands of free and paid themes and plugins from across the wider WordPress ecosystem. In the near future, this will be available for all WordPress.com customers.

The new integrated experience will take that one step further, making getting up and running one-click simple and providing customers with:

A curated selection of the best plugins for every need, saving you the hassle of searching for and comparing from the hundreds of options available.Premium themes that are designed to look beautiful the second they’re activated.Professional help to make your vision a reality – even when you don’t have time to do it yourself.Managed Plugins and Themes, giving you the peace of mind that any plugin or theme you purchase is fully managed by the team at WordPress.com. No security patches. No update nags. It just works. Leaving you to focus on the things that matter most.The knowledge that you’re supporting the ecosystem of WordPress community developers and service providers as they support you in turn with your personal or business goals.Powered by the WordPress community

WordPress isn’t the world’s most popular website builder by accident. Our roots in a huge, and hugely creative, open source community make the platform everything it is and can be.

Giving WordPress.com customers the very best tools and support to achieve their goals will take a village. We’ll be partnering with developers and service providers from across the WordPress ecosystem (and across every part of the world) to make that happen.

As Matt Mullenweg, our CEO and co-founder of the WordPress open source project said recently:

“We’ve got about 2 million people with saved payment details that we can make it one-click easy [for folks] to upgrade, so hopefully this represents a big new potential audience and customer base for people selling things in the WP ecosystem. And of course, we will prioritize working with developers and companies who participate in Five for the Future and contribute back to the WP community.”

Get on the early access list

If you’re a WordPress plugin or theme developer, or you provide professional services for WordPress users, we’d love to hear from you, today.

Drop your details in the form below, and as we work to expand the products and services we’ll bring to WordPress.com customers, you’ll be first on the list when we start reaching out to form new partnerships.

Submit a form.

We can’t wait to work with you!

Celebrating Black History Month

For much of Black history in the US, a lot of stories have gone untold. As we wrap up Black History Month, our team at Automattic — the company behind WordPress.com — wanted to share how we celebrated with our fellow colleagues. Throughout February, our Black/African Descent employee resource group, Cocoamattic, shined a light on some of these untold stories.

Each week this month, we shared infographics highlighting notable Black/African Descent people from around the world, from inventors and pioneers to Black-first and culture influencers. 

Join us in celebrating 21 heroes.

Learn more about Cocoamattic and our other resource groups or read more about diversity and inclusion at Automattic .

10 Ways to Avoid Unnecessary Meetings with Asynchronous P2s

“Are all your meetings so effective that you look forward to them?” Our CEO, Matt Mullenweg, recently asked us to reflect on this question. Live meetings have their place, and there are conversations that are better done in real-time, whether in person or through video chat. But they can be costly in terms of time and energy.

At Automattic, we are often asked how we manage remote work and how we avoid excessive meetings, and internal email chains. We use P2, a product powered by WordPress.com, to collaborate with colleagues across time zones. My team, for example, lives everywhere from the Philippines to Romania — there is very little time for us to meet live. P2 is a platform for us to brainstorm ideas, share project updates, and communicate asynchronously. It’s a place where we all start our workdays, no matter where we are in the world, and catch up on what we’re all working on, what tasks need to be done, and what decisions need to be made. Think of it as an internal journal. A bulletin board. A virtual watercooler.

For me, it’s kind of like reading the morning news. P2 can work for different kinds of teams or groups — people who work together within a distributed company, a virtual classroom or workshop cohort, an online business interacting with clients or partners, and more. Wondering how P2 can streamline your work, foster asynchronous collaboration, and eliminate unnecessary meetings? Here are 10 ways: 

1. Offer courses that participants can take at their own pace 

We offer courses to help you make the most of your WordPress.com site. For this curriculum, we use P2 as a community hub where students read lessons, ask questions, get tips, and interact with other participants. This can be done asynchronously — students do not need to join Zoom calls at times that don’t fit their schedule, which makes it accessible for everyone, from wherever they are. 

2. Automate requests across teams and departments

You can use P2 to streamline processes in your organization, such as making requests. Need to send a contract to a new employee? Submit a request on your legal team’s P2. Looking for a designer to make a graphic for an upcoming blog announcement? Fill out a request on your design team’s P2. Hoping to parse stats on a recent campaign? Post a request on your data team’s P2. With these workflows in place, there’s no need to set up meetings to make these requests. Further discussions can happen in the post’s comments as needed.

3. Share status updates from across your company

At Automattic, we have a P2 called Thursday Updates where every team is required to post a biweekly status update, which might include project highlights and high-level summaries. At many organizations, these types of updates are often delivered in PowerPoint or Google Slides at live meetings, often to full rooms with people who don’t need to be there. With P2, you can present information and updates with an array of blocks, including media embeds and project tracking tools.

4. Set up a space to introduce new colleagues

The pandemic has changed the way we work, but traditionally, in many environments, new employees are often taken around and introduced to other staff. Automattic is a fully distributed company, and our teammates live around the world. One company tradition requires every new employee to write a welcome post on a designated P2, where they embed a short intro video about themselves. Other posts as part of the onboarding process include new employee interviews. These are all effective ways of getting to know people and to welcome them to your team — without needing to schedule a bunch of in-person meetings.

5. Create a private site to conduct trials with job candidates

The process of hiring a new employee, from start to finish, can be time-consuming. The entire interview timeline can take weeks, sometimes months, often facilitated through an exhausting combination of phone calls, Slack chats, Zoom calls, and in-person meetings. All roles at WordPress.com and the rest of Automattic involve a trial: a period when candidates work with us on a short-term project, and when both sides can assess whether it’s a good fit. We create P2s for candidates on trial, and at this stage are able to learn a lot about them, particularly the way they think, communicate, and collaborate.  And this is important: we believe a culture of strong written communication is essential for remote organizations.

6. Set up a virtual notepad for meetings and brainstorms

Details of live meetings can be lost, especially when no one takes notes! At Automattic, we document external calls with clients and partners, sharing call notes in P2. And because P2s are searchable, employees — past, present, and future — can access important information discussed in meetings, even ones in which they were not present, to understand why decisions were made or to get the context they need to do their work. If you record video calls, you can also embed recordings on P2 with a number of video blocks, including Loom, Vimeo, and more, to supplement call notes. 

7. Collaborate with partners and clients in a dedicated space

If you run a business, you might find that partners and clients often want to schedule a recurring meeting, even if there are no major updates to discuss. P2 is a great platform to complement — and eliminate unnecessary — live meetings. You can create a P2 for your partner or client and brand it visually with custom colors and their company logo, and tweak the sidebar with relevant links and resources. On this dedicated P2, partners and clients can share written updates, ask quick questions, set up future calls, and correspond with your team throughout the week. You can then schedule meetings only when needed.

8. Celebrate wins, publish retrospectives, and more

As you browse this list, you can see the power and versatility of P2. Powered by WordPress.com, P2 is, at its core, an internal journal — a space where your teammates, students, or group members can make announcements and share recaps. In some offices and work environments, people might schedule an after-work outing to commemorate a successful year, or plan an in-person retreat to discuss the long-term vision of a company. But these days, since it’s become harder to throw in-person events and to get together in person, we also use P2 to celebrate wins, post “state of the business” missives and share other essential longer-form content.  

9. Share meetup guides and event summaries

Teams at WordPress.com and across Automattic periodically meet up in person, giving teammates scattered across the globe a chance to see one another in real life. Planning a meetup can take up a lot of time, from researching locations and booking lodging to ensuring flight and other travel costs are within budget. Meetup planners must also wrangle or be aware of accessibility issues, visa procedures of all attendees, internet speed tests, and other logistics. P2 is a great way to compile details and publish post-trip recaps, and archive travel resources for teams who visit these locations in the future. Folks interested in a particular destination can refer to these guides while planning, which cuts down meetings to essential ones only. (Fun fact: historically Lisbon, Portugal, and Hawaii have been the most popular meetup locations at Automattic.)

10. Publish self-guided resources and internal documentation

Teams across WordPress.com have access to a number of documentation P2s that we call Universities — such as Domain University and Scheduling University — that allow employees to self-train in new areas or brush up on skills. These P2s are quite comprehensive — learning this content might require a full-day live training session — but with these online “universities,” staff can work through resources and tutorials in their own time.

P2 is free for everyone. Ready to get started? Create your own P2 today.

Help us define the next stage of Professional Email

If you’ve been a WordPress.com user in any capacity, you’re probably aware that we believe in democratizing publishing and e-commerce. We believe in designing products for everyone, emphasizing accessibility, performance, security, and ease of use. We believe great software should focus on you, so you can share your story, product, or services, and achieve your dreams. We believe you have a say in this product and how it can make your life easier every day you use it.

Since last year, we’ve been working hard to enable more features for Professional Email and our other email products. One of the things we heard from you is that you want annual payment options, so you don’t have to worry about monthly payouts and pricing. Now, we’re happy to announce that annual plans are officially available for Professional Email. Don’t worry: our 3-month free trial is still available, so that you can try out the best-in-class email product with either payment method — without committing up front.

And we haven’t stopped there. WordPress.com now offers one-click webmail access, making it easier than ever to access and manage your emails directly within your site admin panel. That’s better for you, your community, and your customers. We’re also working on integrating webmail into the admin panel to make it easier to manage Professional Email and save you more time to focus on things important to you.

We want to make sure we continue building a product that makes your everyday life a bit better. If you have any ideas for features you’d want us to add, or any cool Professional Email experiences to share with us, drop us a line. We’re in this together!

Not sure where to get Professional Email?

Start here

WordPress.com Favorites: The Travel Architect

Welcome to our brand new series, “WordPress.com Favorites”! In these interviews, we’ll be highlighting bloggers about their passion project. Caution: contents guaranteed to be inspiring.    

First up, The Travel Architect. A teacher from the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, The Travel Architect has been documenting her world-wide travels (usually alongside “the husband”) since 2018. It’s easy to get sucked down the rabbit hole of her writing; she’s always funny and entertaining, provides great tips, and is quite obviously a natural storyteller. Let’s learn more! 

1. When did you realize that you loved to travel, and when did you start making it a priority in your life?

It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact moment in time when I recognized travel as this thing I had to have in my life on a regular basis. Travel was a frequent part of my childhood and youth — cross-country road trips, ski vacations in the Rockies, Jamaica twice before first grade, a class trip to Spain, a month in Belgium as an exchange student, among other adventures — so my love almost certainly stems from those experiences.  

I’ve always been the kind of person who wants to know what’s just beyond the hill in front of me or what’s just around that bend in the river. While I’m not a danger junkie at all (my husband jokingly calls me “Head Safety”), I am attracted to adventure, whether that adventure is trying via ferrata or exploring a new culture. 

There were some lean travel years when I was in college, but after that I went on a two-and-a-half-month Colorado Outward Bound course that involved mountaineering, rock climbing, river rafting, and canyoneering. Shortly thereafter I moved to the mountains of Montana for a new adventure. Those were lean travel years, too, but living in the mountains in a new state felt a bit like travel. There I met my husband and eventually we relocated back to the Midwest, where I did all the mundane things like get a career and buy a house, but I always had to have travel on the horizon.  

That’s the funny thing — I’m actually quite a homebody. I love my home and being at home, but there’s a restlessness there that can only be relieved by travel. Thankfully, I’m married to someone who is a lot like me in that regard. Nearly indistinguishable from my love of travel is my love of travel planning. I know lots of people would sooner take a trans-Pacific flight in the baggage hold of an airliner than plan and book their own travels, but for me it’s pure bliss (except for international COVID travel, when it’s pure hell).

2. Obviously, COVID has totally disrupted “normal” travel. I’m sure some of your plans were set aside — what did you decide to do in place of some of those plans? Was there anything you learned about your passion in the midst of the pandemic?

Yes, aside from a few colleagues at work who tell me they don’t like to travel (huh?!), I hardly know anyone who didn’t have plans ruined. I personally had a solo spring break trip to Sedona that went up in flames, and my husband and I had to cancel our trip to Spain, Andorra, and France. 

Instead, we enacted “Plan B.” We have a little 12-foot travel trailer that we took on a three-week Colorado-Utah-Colorado socially-distanced road trip. 

Once we were vaccinated we felt comfortable flying domestically, so we took a couple of trips out to different parts of California and one to Arizona. That Arizona trip was for my 50th birthday.  I had long planned to do a much bigger trip to mark the occasion, possibly Japan, but that just wasn’t going to work with all the travel restrictions. 

As for lessons learned, I guess it would be about money. When you’re good about saving for travel as I am, and then you don’t have any travel to spend your money on, your travel account can start to get wonderfully plump. That was our state of affairs partway into the pandemic. When we finally started flying domestically to travel, we really splashed out on some nice accommodations in some beautiful spots. I learned that this form of travel, while lovely, can quickly deplete the account that once seemed bottomless. Now that we’re back to traveling a bit more regularly, I’m trying to rein in some of my luxury impulses.

3. Do you have a favorite locale that you find yourself recommending all the time? Maybe you could share one stateside and one international?

Though I was born and raised in Wisconsin, I’m a mountain girl at heart. I will shout from the rooftops my love for Colorado — hands down my favorite state. I’m just transfixed by mountains. I’ve been to Colorado so many times I’ve lost count I and can’t seem to stop going back. Then there’s southern Utah, a close second, followed by the entire Four Corners region, and heck, the entire Mountain West all the way to the Pacific. This is why we haven’t seen much of the eastern seaboard and vast swaths of the southern US — the western United States just keeps calling to us. 

Internationally, for Americans who’ve never traveled abroad before, we often recommend England, which is where my husband is from. It’s a foreign country, but the lack of a language barrier makes it a great first-timer destination. However, our true favorite is France. We love the food, culture, and history. We love practicing our French with the locals. And no, we’ve never found French people rude or unkind. That’s a stereotype I get asked about often. Frankly, I’ve had people be outwardly rude to me only twice on my travels, and those incidents were in England and Italy.

A Few of The Travel Architect’s Favorite Posts:

A Travel Running Run-In   Prepping for Travel: Learning Welsh Laos, Day 4+: Hiking, Remote Villages, and One Really Bad Indian Meal Thoughts on Air Travel 4. Any favorite travel tips that you can share with our readers? Whether about saving money, or the best apps, or some suitcase/backpack hack — we’re all ears! 

I’m more of a “travel stories” than a “travel tips” kind of blogger, but I do have one or two things I’ve learned from experiences that may help others. First, if you’re renting a car, as soon as you take possession of it, take a photo that includes the license plate, make, and model.  Accommodations usually ask for this information when checking travelers in, and this way you don’t have to run out to the car. 

Second: always, always, always scrutinize your travel documents for accuracy. I failed to do this once and the airline nearly succeeded in denying me boarding on my flight to Jamaica. Another time I didn’t scan a hotel website as thoroughly as I should have and ended up booking a nonrefundable room. That was for the canceled trip to Spain and I’m still on the hook for it. (So far, they keep letting me kick the can down the road.) 

5. When and why did you decide to start documenting your travels in a blog? What have you gained from blogging? 

For me, blogging is the perfect marriage of my two favorite things: writing and travel. For two decades my only writing outlet was my annual Christmas letter. Every year I got compliments on it and people suggested I start a blog, but I always thought, “What on earth would I write about?” My husband, too, often urged me to start blogging. 

One evening, fresh off an afternoon of travel planning and still experiencing some residual giddiness, our dinner conversation gave birth to the idea of a blog based around travel. I had long noticed that, despite being introverted, I could talk at length to anyone as long as travel was the topic. My husband had tried to start a blog once but it didn’t take, so the framework was there. We just transferred ownership of his blog to my name and the rest is history.  

In addition to honing my writing skills, I have gained friends (or what I like to call “blog buddies”) around the world. I’ve even met up with some of them — one in Laos, one in Thailand, and one here in Minnesota.

6. What are your travel plans this year?

After a calamitous trip to England this past Christmas when Omicron was at its peak, we’ve sworn off international travel until the US removes its testing requirement to return home (I check weekly for news of its demise). 

Still, there’s plenty to see and do in this massive country, so we’re taking advantage of that. I have my long-awaited solo spring break trip to Sedona coming up, two years after it was originally scheduled. Then we’re spending a few weeks in June with our travel trailer in Colorado where we’ll be cycling, hiking a pair of 14ers, and soaking in lots of hot springs. My 85-year-old mom and I might head out to (yet another part of) California for a few days mid-summer, an idea that’s just come about and that will provide me with many hours of glorious travel planning. 

Finally, we just booked a week in Death Valley over Christmas. We’ve been there twice before, but always in summer when it’s 125 degrees with overnight lows in the 90s. It’ll be nice to have cooler temperatures so we can finally do some hiking and not have to force-feed ourselves a diet of Gatorade and ice cubes.

Are you inspired to revamp your own blog or bring it back from the dead? Take 10 minutes right now to visit your site and do some writing.

Or maybe you never really got the hang of the basics when it comes to blogging. If that’s the case, our “Intro to Blogging” course will be perfect for you. This free, self-paced course provides not only concrete tips for your site and blog, but also the goal-setting mindset needed to keep a blog going. Register for free today: 

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