How do you develop a website while backpacking round the world without carrying a computer?

How was travel directory OneWorld365 (www.oneworld365.org) created?

In 2007 graduating with degree in media from Liverpool University and having worked twice in USA at Summer Camp younger brother Paul approached elder brother Steven, a software engineer with idea to publish a website listing summer camp placements.

This expanded to include a range of Gap Year activities including volunteering, language schools, seasonal & work abroad.

At that time a few websites had regional listings but there was nothing searchable.

In library publisher Susan Griffith offered a good guidebook with listings and Lonely Planet also offered advice.

Our idea was to offer free listings to non-profits, NGO’s & grass roots organisations and options for priority listings to bigger travel providers. You could go direct to project provider or book all inclusive through a reseller.

Realizing that taking booking & organising placements required a large team, we decided instead to advertise the idea of meaningful travel possibilities.

Soon we found in addition to students many seniors & corporate workers on sabbatical were also interested in a meaningful travel experience with local people’s.

The website and CMS was developed during a round the world backpacking adventure using internet cafe computers and VI (putty).

Whilst most travellers in cybercafe were checking their Hotmail and some were Skyping home on video call we were typing furiously into a Unix terminal emulation shell prompt.

Having little money for resources and with a rapidly growing audience on technical side we started with a virtual hosting running BSD Unix from Texas data centre and used open source technologies..

Currently the site is hosted in Frankfurt with IONOS in VPS virtual server running CentOS Linux, PostgresSQL, PHP, NGINX and Apache SOLR Lucerne.

Essential maintenance is mostly now carried out using SSH from Android Mobile phone.

Do we need to develop an App? Wasn’t promise of Netscape Navigator that we no longer need to install software applications? Instead everything runs in “web browser” which is available on all platforms?

At present serving ~1 million annual readers (post pandemic the worldwide appetite for travel has increased significantly) with 15k project listings in nearly every country of world, 2.5k community contributed articles and 10gb of photos!

Where next? Multi-lingual offering allowing native speakers to read & publish in their regions language. Post-pandemic travel ban and listings, should be reviewed with heads up on which projects are active.

From content point of view we’d like to in better position to monetize our worldwide wandering team of content creators. On technical side we need additional contributor(s) to maintain, update & ultimately takeover.

One of the best aspects of this project is it actively inspired and encouraged other people around the world to participate in the idea of creating and offering meaningful educative cultural exchange travel projects.

#opensourcesoftware

#meaningfultravel

#volunteering

#worktheworld

#gapyear

#php #postgres #apache #nginx #linux #putty