One of the things that I worry about when traveling is how to make sure to back up my photos.  I use a compact zoom camera that shoots on SD cards.  I also typically have a tablet (which I bring to keep up on work email) with me.  So each night I offload the pictures from the SD card to the iPad using the Apple Lightning to SD Card Reader.  The pics then go into the Photos app and, if I have wifi, they automatically upload to iCloud.  But I am belt and suspenders kind of person (as if you didn’t already know that) and so I wanted another way to back up photos before I get back to the hotel in the evening, or if the iPad flakes out.  So I found this amazing product, called the RavPower Filehub Plus:

This is a pretty incredible device.  For my purposes, it has both an SD card slot and a USB connector.  That means that I can plug my SD card directly into the SD slot and plug a thumb drive into the USB slot.  Then, using an app on my phone, I can tell the device to copy all of the files from the SD card directly to the USB drive.  That’s amazing.  And the Filehub is also a battery charger (that can charge a phone) so it has all of its own internal power to do the transfer.  The way the app on your phone connects to it is via a small wifi network that the device creates.  All of this and it weighs about 4 ounces.  It has a bunch of other geeky features (wifi hot spot, router, ethernet to wifi bridge) so it is a fantastic device.  But for me, after we visit somewhere and go back to the car I can immediately transfer the files from the SD card to the USB stick and have a quick backup of critical pictures.  Amazing.

Now for the blog:  I have my own domain (blsigroup.com) that is hosted by a company in the midwest (Verve Hosting, and they are fantastic!).  As a result, not only do we get our own email, I also have the ability to run my own blog software.  So I am running WordPress on my domain.  When you run it yourself (as opposed to having it hosted by another company), you have the ability to easily add in your own WordPress plugins.  And I am using three plugins to run this blog.  The first is called FaceBook Autopublish which takes any posts that I make to the blog and immediately posts it to my Facebook timeline.  However, if someone was not one of my Facebook friends, they would have to keep checking the blog to see if there was anything new (and, realistically, who would do that?).  So I am using another plugin from MailChimp that is pretty cool:  On the right side of this page there is a subscribe box that comes from the MailChimp plugin.  When you subscribe, your email address is stored in a MailChimp list that I created (MailChimp is free).  I have configured MailChimp to check my blog once a day at 1:00pm eastern time to see if there have been any new blog posts in the past 24 hours.  If there has been, Mailchimp will send an email message to the subscribers with short excepts of the posts that you can then click on to read them.  That allows people who are not my Facebook friends to get a notice once a day of new posts and they can then decide whether to click through to the blog to read them.

Finally, I am using a WordPress plugin called Postie.  While traveling we may not be able to get access to WordPress.  So Postie allows me to send posts to the blog via email.  We send an email message to a specific address.  Twice each hour Postie checks that email account to see if there is any new email, and if yes it turns that email into blog posts for us.  That means that even if I can not use my phone to send email, all I need to do is find some way to send an email message and Postie will then post it to this blog.  I think that is pretty cool.

So that’s the technology we plan to use.  If you find it helpful and interesting, then that’s great.  If not, then fear not:  this is the only geeky post I plan to make.

Four days and counting…