Making Websites while Traveling the World

By: SammyK • Nov 2nd

It sounds glamorous, doesn't it? I'm traveling the world, going to some crazy-awesome places and meeting some really cool people. The whole time I'm doing some web development work to pay for some of my expenses like hiking up a volcano, or getting my groove on at a European disco.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. But not very glamorous.

In order to work on the internet - you need an internet connection. Sounds easy, right? Just go to a coffee shop and get you some free access. If only it were that easy.

I have absolutely no problems finding open WiFi access points around the world. Even the tiny little remote towns of Guatemala are bathed in a plethora of WiFi networks. The problem has been getting internet that works. I guess not all countries put a focus a fast and reliable internet access.

I realized that my mood is often determined by how good the internet access is. If it's slow and keeps disconnecting, I'm a little irritable. If it's fast and stable, I'm as happy as a fat kid at McDonalds.

But fast and stable has only happened to me a few times since I started traveling about 2 months ago. It's particularly frustrating when I have to upload several 70MB video files for our video podcast and it uploads at 5 KB/s and then restarts half-way through. Yeah, that's when I really start getting irritable.

So when you find internet that works, you use it. No mater where it is. The photo of me above was taken last night when I was making some changes to HeartSupport. I was sitting in front of a shop in a little town called Coyhaique in Chile. It was late at night, it was freezing, and as people walked by they looked at me like I was a bum... who was using a brand-new MacBook Pro for some reason.

It takes many hours of development time to make a website, but I only get a small window of internet access everyday. So how do I develop around the world?

Thanks to my new MacBook ProAwesomeness, it's easy. I just set up my computer like a server with all the stuff I need like Apache, MySQL, PHP and ModRewrite. Then I edit my /etc/hosts file to make it so that when I type in "http://somedevsite/" it pulls up the site right on my computer without any internet access. How cool is that?

Tags: internet, travel, Web, wifi