Here’s a little round up of what life was like for this little blog in 2011 so I can look back and see how it’s grown – this is what life was like this past year in 2011, from everywhere I travelled to all the fun stuff that happened to me.
First solo trips ever!
I had never travelled solo before this, but now that I have, it’s hard to stop. Less excuses not to travel when you only have your schedule to coordinate!
My first trip was to South Korea, a week long sightseeing and shopping sojourn in Seoul.
And then I went to Vietnam – 8 hectic days in Hanoi, Halong Bay and Hue, Hoi An and the longest train ride EVER. Have a look at all my trip posts in North and Central Vietnam.
I didn’t travel by my lonesome all the time though… I did do a short family road trip up to nearby Port Dickson just before Christmas as well.
In 2012
I hope to travel more! After a year of Asia, it’s time to go further in the new year. Possibly a Scandinavian adventure? Plans are in the works… I’ve also got the beautiful Dalmatian coastlines of Croatia on my mind as an option. I also hope to go diving, which kept getting put off in 2011, so I’m determined to go underwater this year!
A new home at theoccasionaltraveller.com
Yup, I finally got tired of reminding people to add the wordpress.com domain to the web address, and the shop was doing well enough that I forked out the cash and figured out the tech-jiggery to move The Occasional Traveller to its own domain.
I have to give credit to the Biz Ladies column on Design Sponge – some of the articles were very helpful with tips on setting up your own online space for the less than tech-savvy (i.e. ME). Some of my friends and family have commented that the site looks pretty nice (thank you!), and I have to say that it’s actually much easier to create a nice website than one might think.
2011 also put The Occasional Traveller on Facebook and Twitter, which are great ways to stay connected and get the quickest updates.
In 2012
The site will undergo constant upgrading and tweaking in 2012 as I figure out more html/css along the way. It’s a long drawn process, as I mentioned in the TOTshop Round Up, but I hope to make the website as pretty and functional as possible.
Always working on new projects
Anywhere Travel Guide
There was 2011’s resolution project Anywhere Travel Guiding 2011, where I aimed to finish all 60 cards of the Anywhere Travel Guide and only managed 8 in total =/ The cards were completed both in Singapore and overseas.
Go! Girl Guides
I started contributing at Go! Girls Guide, whose stories you’ll see crossposted here with some additional nuggets at the end for my readers. There are only 3 articles for now, but look out for more in future. It’s a great opportunity to hone my writing and share my travel experiences with more people. All the writing is great practice and reliving the good ol’ days is definitely a bonus.
And a lot more crafting – playing around on my letterpress for the annual calendar swap, and learning new skills like book binding, rubber stamp making and linocut printing.
I’m definitely hoping to continue the Anywhere Travel Guiding series for 2012, which might be an easier task given that I found the iphone app version of it =) I’ll also continue writing at Go! Girls Guide, and maybe look at contributing at other places too… hopefully there can be more guest posting here as well so there’s more variety and viewpoints here. And more crafting please! I definitely want to put the skills I picked up to use, and to pick up new ones!
Don’t stop the presses
2011 was unprecedented in press coverage. I made Singapore’s major local daily The Straits Times twice much to my friends and family’s amusement when they recognized my face.
and I had some pretty great features in some higher profile blogs as well:
- ‘What Travels With You’ feature on Bloomize
- ‘Boarding Pass’ on Pret a Voyager
And the shop had some nice features as well:
- Giveaway + Collaboration with Faz from The Drama Diaries for Anywhere Travel Guide
- Anthology article on the Anywhere Travel Guide
- Cool Hunting Gift Guide suggestion for The Anywhere Travel Guide definitely helped it sell out!
- Mother and Baby Singapore’s 1 page TOTshop feature
- The Frugal Traveler’s feature of the Mighty Tag for their gift guide
In 2012
Who knows what will happen in 2012? Getting more news out about The Occasional Traveller hopefully! Ideally I would like to be able to grow the site into a full-time thing, but until then, I’ll just have to keep working on my own time management. Do spread the word about TOT if you like it! There are plenty of channels to connect to TOT, through the main site here, and the Facebook Page and Twitter.
And that’s 2011 for The Occasional Traveller! See my favourite posts in 2011 and this TOTshop round up.