More Affordable Way to Run a Blog on a Ship

Computer time is expensive on the ship. It is up to 75 cents per minute. If you buy a package of 1,000 minutes, you pay $250, so that brings the cost down to 25 cents per minute.

I have been posting items to the blog while I am on line. To post 10-12 pictures this way takes about 30 minutes of computer time, even if I’ve typed the text offline, and then cut and paste it onto the blog postings.

That means that doing the blog the way that I’ve been doing it would have cost over $1,000 if I had to pay for the computer time. I get reimbursed for computer time because of the cabin that we bought, so this has not been an issue. However, if I were paying for the computer time, I doubt that I’d have been willing to spend $1,000 to run the blog.

Today I learned from another passenger of a way around this issue. You can set up an email address for your blog. It is located under the “settings” tab on the blog setup site. Once you have this, you set up an e-mail system that can operate offline. (I already had this.)

So now, I simply work offline using a separate e-mail (made out to my blog’s email address) for each topic that I want to post. I add any pictures as attachments to the email. Once I have them all ready, I simply go on line, enter my email, and hit “send” for the items in my outbox. All of the emails go to the blog and are posted automatically.

Using this approach, I only need to be online for a few minutes for each posting, instead of a half hour. The total computer time using this approach on this length cruise would be more like $50 to $100, rather than $1,000. That makes it reasonable to do when you are paying for the computer time.