What's up with The Camping Machine?

If you read my last post you know that I have launched a new website called The Camping Machine. Long-time readers of this blog (most of whom have stopped reading as I have all but stopped posting) may remember this post and this one where I mentioned our travel trailer and the camping trips we have taken. Our family has had fun the past two years visiting national and state parks and doing the whole trailer camping thing. We enjoy spending time outdoors and seeing new places. The boys in particular really get excited as we prepare for each trip, and MBW and I believe this is a great way for us to spend time together as a family.

As a blogger I am drawn to the idea of communicating my thoughts and ideas with others. I like the idea of putting my posts out there, knowing that people are reading my words or looking at my photos and occasionally providing feedback (or pushback) on my views. I do check the stats on the blog to see how many people are reading and I get satisfaction when the numbers are trending up.

I consider myself a creative person – by nature, by schooling and by vocation. The Family Man blog has been a great creative outlet. I’ve enjoyed it and have learned a great deal about myself, my family and the people who have read my posts. But as you may have discerned, my passion for it has waned as I’ve felt limited by the format and, to an extent, the theme. This may be because I don’t know html at all and really couldn’t figure out how to customize the blog page to add any character. And while I realize the attraction for the readers is the content, not the packaging, I still felt constrained.

While making our annual summer trips towing The Camping Machine we have spent time on rural two-lane roads. At any significant hill our speed drops well below the posted limit, and the line of cars stacked up behind us grows quickly. Being the conscientious person that I am, I try to use pullouts, passing lanes or other opportunities to let those unencumbered with trailers to pass us. Often, however, someone will spend a long time behind our trailer, staring at the back end.

As a marketer by trade (I work in an advertising agency) I thought it would be interesting to build a website and see what kind of traffic I could generate by having the website url on the back bumper of the trailer. The fact that I don’t have a website to promote really didn’t enter my mind as I pondered the idea. I thought about putting the url for this blog on the back, but that didn’t really excite me. So I thought about it off and on over the winter as The Camping Machine sat on the RV pad next to our house, snug under its cover.

One day on a lark I went to one of those website domain search sites and typed in thecampingmachine.com, and lo and behold the url was available. I went ahead and bought it, not really knowing what, if anything, I would ever do with it. Over the next few weeks I tried to figure out how to put up a site. A year ago I had purchased Dreamweaver and put it on my compute, but I never made the time to learn how to use it. After the first couple of weeks I let it go and moved on to something else – like writing the science fiction novel.

As camping season drew closer I thought again about building a website and promoting it on the back of our rig. I went to Web.com and bought one of those ‘web-site-in-a-box’ solutions that promised an easy, step-by-step solution to building a website. Choosing from far too many templates I started work on it, and if you go here you’ll see the progress (or lack thereof) I’ve made. The solution is almost as simple as advertised, and although it does seem to have limitations there is quite a bit a novice like me can do with it.

Getting back to the original question, my thought for the site was to provide a larger frame for the blog. I still intend to write about the usual topics, but I’ll focus a bit more on the camping aspect during the summer and perhaps do more entries around where we go and what we see. I’ll be able to show more photography, another creative outlet of mine, and perhaps some of you will find that interesting. And I want to test my original hypothesis, which is that a captive audience can be motivated to action if they are exposed to a message long enough. I will be interested to see how many visitors the site gets once we get out on the road and start blocking traffic.

For those of you who aren’t campers, I will tell you the people you meet at campgrounds are by and large very nice folks. Many of them love to stroll over to the campers in the next site and visit about their rigs, where they’ve been and what they like to do on the road. I expect that some of them will see the url on the rig while it is parked in the campground and check out our site from the comfort of their oversized, overpriced luxury motor homes using the wireless internet connection provided by the KOA. I would not be surprised if some of their stories make in into the blog – in fact, I see this as a rich source of content that could provide for some very amusing tales.

One thing I was surprised to find was the lack of blogs from people who do the camping thing regularly. As I was assembling links for the Links page of the website I wanted to link to some blogs that would resonate with the camping audience, and I did not find many. Maybe the blog on The Camping Machine site will find readers among those who’ve looked for a camping blog.

Ultimately The Camping Machine website will replace this blog. The blog portion of the webite will be written by The Family Man, will sound like The Family Man and contain stories that would have appeared on The Family Man blog. In fact, if anyone knows how to link a Blogger blog to a regular web site please let me know and I’ll just change the name and bring this blog to The Camping Machine site.

If you go to the site now you’ll see I’m re-running some of my earlier Family Man posts. I’m trying to keep the content on that site fresh, and I actually am enjoying seeing some of my earlier posts again. People who visit the site as a result of puttering along behind the trailer for 45 minutes won’t know these posts are re-runs. Soon I will mix in new posts with the re-runs and it won’t belong before it is all new content.

So please check out the new website. If you are linking to this blog please change your link to The Camping Machine. If I don’t already link to your site, send me your link and I’ll put it on the site. And if you visit my site please give me your feedback and let me know what you think.

I’ll have to decide if I want to keep my sign-off. It is great to be the Family Man, but it’s a bit out of context on the new site.