Welcome to Jetlag!
Nice to meet you. Why don't you let me show you around?
What is Jetlag?
Jetlag is my personal travel blog, journal, diary… what have you.
With friends, family and coworkers all asking for regular updates for my trip to Japan, I decided I was going to try writing a blog. This way, anyone who feels like checking in on me can do so – no matter the time difference.
This blog is built with Jekyll, a static site generator. This means I can quickly deploy posts by writing a markup document, which is then turned into an HTML page and pushed to Github. Provided I don’t mess up… I definitely haven’t killed this page twice already, trying to do just that…
How does Jetlag work?
Home
Whenever I publish a new post, that post will appear on the Home page, usually second from the top (since this post will be pinned to the top for the foreseeable future).
Categories
Just below Home, you’ll find Categories. In there you’ll find posts organised by their type. As an example, this post has the category “Update”. This category is for general information about the site itself, maintenance notices, milestones… all the stuff that has little to do with this being a blog.
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Diary | Regular posts about my trip. This is the meat of this page, telling you what I’ve done and how it was. |
| Gallery | For each trip, there will be an image gallery containing a myriad of pictures, sorted by date. Whether those posts go up during or after my trips remains to be seen. |
| Gear | Posts ahead of my journey where I talk about what and how I packed. This may make me look woefully underprepared but rest assured, that’s exactly the case. |
| Update | Posts about major updates and changes to the site, maintenance notices, milestones and other news that I deem important. This may include a changelog if appropriate. |
Categories can have subcategories. As an example, the category “Diary” has subcategories for each place I’ve been to and wrote about. This way you have all the posts about a specific destination neatly organised. As an example, here you find all the posts about my trip to Japan in 2024.
Tags
Every Diary type post has tags associated with it. The Tags section displays all the different tags to you, so you can filter for posts about specific topics and dates. I’ve tried to have a system here as well and defined a set of overarching groups, for each of which a minimum of one tag will be set.
| Tag Group | Examples |
|---|---|
| Date | 2024, autumn, november |
| Location | asia, japan, tokyo |
| Activity | hiking, shopping, sightseeing |
The idea of these tags is that you can find Diary type posts for both broad and niche queries. If you want to travel to the far east and are looking for inspiration, you may have a look at “asia” tagged posts. On the other hand, if you know you’ll have vacation over the easter holidays, you may want to look at the tags “april” or “spring”.
Archives
For every post a link in Archives is created and put on the timeline. This is just a neat overview of my blogging history.
About
Lastly, this is a page introducing me and the blog. In About you’ll find contact information and some words about how this blog came to be. Truthfully, if you’ve read this post up until here, you’re not going to find much in terms of new information.
At the time of writing, the blog won’t yet have all that many tags, categories or content in general. Some of the links above referencing specific filters will not work. As the blog fills up I will adjust the links to work properly and eventually remove this warning altogether.
Staying up to date
I have the very naive idea of posting almost every day while I’m traveling. At least provided no technical issues arise. If you know me well enough, you’re rightfully laughing at me now, and honestly, so am I.
Nonetheless, when I eventually give up on posting every day (and you thus give up on checking the blog every day), you can still stay informed whenever anything actually happens here.
For all my fellow basement dwellers out there, you could (in theory) watch the Github repo. I advise against it, there’s a solid chance the commit history is a mess and you’ll have to switch this blog to light mode to burn your retinas out. That’s the only way to cleanse the horrors witnessed on Github. I’m not going to put a link to the repo in this post but if you somehow can’t find it, I suggest an alternative career path.
For the slightly more normal people, there’s an RSS feed in the bottom left. If you’ve got an RSS-Reader installed, this will notify you whenever a new post is added.
Final thoughts
That about wraps it up.
If you’ve got any questions or feedback, don’t be shy to contact me directly. My contact information is plastered all over this blog, I’m sure you’ll find it. I’ll try to get back to you in a timely manner but give me some time, especially when you find that I’m traveling.
I hope you’re looking forward to this undertaking as much as I am, and I hope you have a good time reading through my blog.
Kindly
Fabian