I have written this small article on a weekend in Costa Rica, after some dental surgery, to keep myself busy. All information is current around mid-November 2007 (links might change!)

Your own Website, Travelogue, Travelblog

DON'T WAIT UNTIL A PUBLISHER FINDS YOU - PUBLISH YOURSELF!
Several people we met along the way have asked us if it is difficult to have your own website. Our answer is usually "No, but it takes a little time to maintain."
If you want your own web pages, and see them as an extension of your personal diary or a replacement of mass-emails to family and friends, then the effort to turn this into online pages should be minimal. It can be as easy as typing your diary into Word™ (or a similar software), or a more elaborate process involving page design and set-up of particular software (like the one displaying our images). I have no intention of teaching you how to create a web page - there are enough tools around to help with this process, and the basic knowledge can be found on hundreds of free internet pages. I myself have been earning part of my living with web sites since 1995, so I know a bit about the topic. Hence the logical step was to have our own domain (dare2go.com) and to pay for hosting (at Cirtex); all up this is an expense of around $US35 per year (not more than a good dinner at a restaurant). In return this gives us a little more control over things, and our pages are free of any unwanted advertising. But there are countless options for getting a decent looking Travelblog for free; these are usually easy to maintain (even from an internet café), and many of them only display a few GoogleAds™ alongside your text.

Option 1 - Paid Hosting:
If you like the path we have chosen, your own domain and paid hosting, you will have to spend upwards of $US25 per year = not really a fortune...
A domain registration will cost you something from $US1.99 upwards, most likely around $US8-9/year [.info domains are cheaper to buy, but their re-newal costs the same as others]. Basic hosting starts at around $US1.50/month, or $US18/year, and these cheap plans require an annual payment.
There's a good web site called Find My Hosting to search for hosting deals; for a personal page, like a Travelogue, a 'Super Cheap' Plan should be sufficient (you can always upgrade).
If you don't know much about hosting then make sure your hosting plan will include access to a tool like CPanel, which makes server management and set-up of tools/software a breeze.
On most servers this should give you access to some kind of pre-installed Weblog Software [Wikipedia Explanation] - the easiest way to get a ready-made website without the design headache. The most widely used free Wordpress comes with 1,000s of pre-designed 'themes', which you can use (and maybe pep-up with your own photos/graphics).
Please don't use Microsoft's Frontpage™ as it creates a bloated html-code full of unneeded tags - slow loading pages are the result.
 

Option 2 - it's free (and still good):
Almost everything you get with paid hosting you can also get for free - if you know where to look... The only trade-off is: most of these servers insert advertising into your pages, and you don't have any say what they might advertise!
Travelpod and the similar Footstops (both Canadian sites) are probably the best to publish a travel diary on-line; their lay-out and features, like Google Maps linked to your content, are geared towards a travelogue. There is even a German version at Weltreiseblogs which is aimed at German speaking travellers. But you might as well use a blog [Wikipedia Explanation] server like Blogger [now owned by Google] or Google Pages, though you might miss out on some travel specific features, and the Blogger servers were fairly slow in recent months...
With many free hosting options you can use your own domain name (if you wish) or one of the re-direction services mentioned at the bottom of this article - so you get an easy to remember web address!
 
As with Option 1 [Paid Hosting - see above] with free hosting it's important to compare what different companies are offering, particularly regarding overall storage, number of photos permitted, and monthly bandwidth allowance (you don't want your site being shut down halfway through a month for exceeding your bandwidth). With text (your diary or blog) you will hardly ever exceed any storage or bandwidth limit - it's a different story if you plan to add a lot of photos. Yet the rescue is right here on the internet, and it's free:

Free Photo Storage:
There are plenty of servers which offer you free hosting of your digital images. The way they finance this is either by advertising, like the free blog servers, by offering you prints of your digital images, or selling an option to upgrade to a paid (and usually expensive) account.
The upload procedure with most photo servers is too time-consuming to store all your photos (from an internet café), but it's a good option to share your best shots with family and friends, and maybe integrate them into your diary/blog. Check if the server allows 'hot-linking' of files! If they allow it you can save storage and bandwidth on your diary/blog server (really worth it if you pay for hosting!) by integrating the photos from another site (most photo servers give you detailed instructions on how to do this).
PutFile, PictureTrail, and ImageShack are all servers which allow hot-linking of images, but wellknown sites like Flickr and WebShots also offer integration with blogging software and sites.

Getting Started:
Whichever option you choose, paid or free hosting, your own design or blogging software, storage of photos on your server or externally on a free photo server (all options detailed above), take some time to get the basic site ready before you leave! (This is what our site looked like before leaving.)
Try to plan things like
* how many photos you would like to include
* if you want to integrate the photos in the text and have the text flow around them (looks better, but is more complicated to achieve), or if you simply add your photos at the bottom or an external link
* what pages you are likely to create and what navigation you might need to link to them
* and other details...
 
And don't plan on updating your site daily (or even on a very regular basis) - after all: you want to go travelling, see the sights, and not be a slave to your Travelogue or Traveldiary (plus: internet access might be patchy, too)!
Try to keep your entries short (ours seem to be too long) - more people will read all of them, and it's less work for you writing the updates! The fewer photos you add the less work you will have with re-naming them and uploading them...
Finally: try to make everything as easy and maintanance-free as possible! A guestbook might look like a good idea, as might 'comments' to your photos or blog entries, but all text input by visitors is open to spam. We had to delete our first guestbook because within less than two weeks it was filled with over hundred spam entries advertising casinos, viagra, rolex replicas - all the stuff you can find in unwanted emails. And with image and blog comments I have seen the same happen on some sites. If you really want 'comments ON' on your pages then try to install Bad-Behavior, a PHP-spam filter, or Spam Karma for WordPress! But remember: with every piece of software things will get more complex and less maintanance-free...

Other tools which you might want to use:
 This tool or this tool to create a FAVICON [read more] from an image file.
 Statcounter: a good free counter, which records a great deal of details.
 Special Characters: if you're writing words, or names of places/people, in any other language than English make sure you use these codes to display things like Ø, á, ê, ü and Æ!
 Programs for USB Stick: very handy if you want to use your own program versions (or bookmarks) in internet cafés.
 Smartdots, co.tc domains, or dot.TK domains to get a redirection name for long sub-domains [eg just www.Your-Name.de.tc instead of http://www.travelpod.com/members/Your-Name].

Links for people with advanced knowledge:
 Mandarin Design - Text Tricks: see how you can manipulate text with advanced CSS tricks.
 Cross Browser: many different lay-out and menu designs using CSS.
 htaccess Tools: htaccess is used to control your server, eg. lock some directories.
 Webmaster Toolkit: browse for some helpful tools or CSS code (like menus).

All links will open into the same NEW window! No guarantee that all links will work, or provide the best and cheapest information available.