We have been on a long, complicated, and frequently dangerous journey in a conflict zone, back home now and safe. I needed an easy, consistent method to keep our families and friends informed about our whereabouts and status. Before we left home, I set up a travel journal in Craft and shared the link.
This worked beautifully for the four weeks of travel. Every morning I added a new card to the journal, that readers could click to open and see the recap of the prior day’s events. I included links, photos, videos. The journal had a separate photo journal. Occasionally, I wanted to explain a location or historical background for a daily topic, and would add additional cards for that.
Our friends and family made good use of the comment features to highlight journal entries they wanted to know more about.
I mainly edited the journal on the 13" iPad I traveled with. Photos captured on the iPhone. And I used the daily note in Craft on the iPhone to log notes and images I would use later for the daily log note I published for in the travel journal.
I have used other approaches for shared travel journals created to keep friends and family up to date, but Craft excelled at this:
Anything added to a shared page is published in real time without needing to fuss with additional “publish” phases
Links to other pages can be shared without opening up the whole space to public view
Easy to compose using a professional look and feel without fuss
Easy to embed photos and videos and other content from the iPad or iPhone, as well as rich links to web sites when external content was needed
Easy to link between pages / cards
Easy to move blocks and edit on the fly, when journal entries were created as events occurred
Many times I captured and published photos in seconds. Click, edit photo, add to Craft.
Our readers do not need to own Craft – the most important feature. They can see what we want them to see in an normal, rich web format without having to know anything about the software that created the web page
For me, this was a perfect use of Craft, which was totally reliable throughout the trip.
I strongly agree that Craft is excellent for creating web-based shared content. I tried it a few years ago for personal knowledge management but didn’t find it suitable. However, it’s outstanding for the kind of shared content described here. (Never thought of using it as a travel journal, and I like the idea of using Craft’s ‘cards’ for individual entries.)
As an academic and teacher, I use Craft for two main purposes:
Classroom notes: I maintain a running note of resources and references that come up during class. I share the Craft link with students at the start of the semester and update it on the spot. It’s also easy to embed images, PDFs, and other media—sometimes I might handwrite something or annotate a PDF, and then just drop those files into the Craft document.
Conference handouts: For presentations, I create digital handouts and share my slides via Craft. It’s become my go-to platform for this. A major strength is Craft’s responsive design—shared pages display well on any device (phone, tablet, laptop, etc.), so people in the audience on a variety of devices can access the same content with equal ease. (This works better, I think, that accessing a PDF or slide deck on a smartphone, for instance.)
Also, I’m on some level of the paid-tier that is free for educators and renews annually without fuss, so this is free.
I was initially very enthusiastic about Craft, but I think they had a couple of misssteps. First, they announced plug-ins that never materialized. Second, they pivoted to business use, and then pivoted back to individual use as their primary market. I think this led to confusion, and at the same time, other apps were promoted heavily during that same general period of time, for example, Obsidian and NotePlan to name a few.