How we run Tripchron (the boring bit, made slightly less boring)

We started this blog in 2019 as Trip Chronicles. June, who used to cut words for a living, cut it to Tripchron within the week, on the grounds that nobody would type the rest into a phone. She was right. She usually is about words, and almost never about how long anything takes to pack.

For years it ran on one of those platforms where you spend more time on plugins than on writing. This year we moved it to WroteAbout, where the trips, the maps and the costs are built in, and we pointed our own domain at it.

01 Our own address

Our blog lives at www.tripchron.com. Setting it up took one record at our domain's DNS provider and about four minutes of waiting. This is the whole of it:

Type    Name    Target
CNAME   www     domains.wroteabout.com

The certificate, the padlock and everything else happened by itself. The bare address, tripchron.com, sends you to www, which our DNS provider does with one redirect rule.

02 What having our own domain gets us

• Our own name in the address bar, and in search results.
• Our own ads and analytics, in our own code, on our own pages.
• Our own ads.txt, which ad networks need before they'll pay you.
• Our own colour: azulejo blue, and a strip of tile along the top. That's a few lines of CSS.
• Our own call on links: we choose whether each outside link is followed, nofollow or sponsored.

On links

When we recommend something we paid for ourselves, the link is followed: we want the place to get the credit. When there's money in it, it's marked sponsored, as Google asks and as you deserve. Everything else is nofollow by default. You'll find our rules in Google's guide to qualifying links, which is shorter and less exciting than this paragraph.

What we don't do

We don't take free stays in exchange for good reviews, we don't let anyone read a post before you do, and we don't put ads in the middle of a sentence. If that ever changes, you'll read about it here first.

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