Category updates

You may have noticed that ATC has been under construction for a few weeks. Okay, okay it’s been a few months. I’ve been busy painstakingly selecting and tweaking a design, loading new content, redesigning the layout and organizing the archives into a more searchable horde of content. If you visited while the pages were in disarray, I apologize for the chaos– the creative process isn’t an orderly thing, it’s more of a buckshot-into-glass type thing.

NEW STUFF on ATC:

We’ve added a new section called ATC Lifestyle where you can find information on what it means to ATC, what we believe, our philosophy, financing travel, and more. Our humor page is here, but so is our page on why vegans are neat. Under resources, in the same section, you’ll find tips to abandon your cube as well as great gear to start your paired down lifestyle.

You’ll also notice off the bat that we have an expanded section on Adventure, which covers everything from famous explorers, to top ten travel lists to great adventure travel companies to backpacking.

On the Road is where you’ll find insight into the Best American Road Trips and the Mongol Rally.

Our Guides section has been cleaned up and we’re excited to offer a bit of information on every country we’ve been to. We only cover the places we’ve actually been. What’s the point of reading a blog about hypothetical travel? Nope, these guides are about the places we have been, where we’ve stood and what we saw.

The homepage is different, and the first thing you’ll notice is that it’s pulling in a lot of our featured content. It was like looking through a treasured photo album for me as I picked and chose which blog posts would pull into the home page. After nearly a decade of blogging about abandoning the cube, there is a lot of content on the site. Some good, some not so great, some riddled with typos from writing on bumpy back roads in China, others riddled with typos from the time I had dysentery in Turkmenistan, or had only ten pre-paid minutes of internet in Odessa to blog. It was a nostalgic hoorah that ended with me finally grabbing a few to pull into the homepage, with the aspiration to rotate out old content and keep a cycle of fresh content on the page. Dream big, they say.

What do you think of the new design, layout, direction? Let us know!

That’s right. We’ve done it again. This is the third reincarnation of ATC. Ah, from its humble beginning as a Dreamweaver site using homemade templates to a mid-level Dreamweaver site, to a modern, shiny site that has all the navigation, responsiveness and interactive features the 21st century of ADD viewers demands.

We pay homage to the old site, which was a masterpiece in terms of human patience as we slowly built, nurtured and tried not to strangle the difficult and bulky site. Slowly, we came to detest the limitations of Dreamweaver. It was hard to update static pages. Harder still to get the templates to do what we wanted, and it just looked like something from the 1990s. On the road, we needed a platform that didn’t mean every little change required a full overhaul. Hence, our conversion to WordPress.

The old site:

Of course we put a lot of love and work into every single page. Above is our beer page. Today you can see that same page with all the same content (images, text) in our new theme, which allows you to cursor over each image to see the background story behind each breakfast beer. I’ll miss the long scroll style of reading on the web. But I might be the only dinosaur who enjoyed that. As we add more features (and more photos!) check back on the beer page to see what’s happening in the world of early morning ales.

Above is our Guides page. I painstakingly made each graphic using my Bamboo in Corel Draw. I then made sure the sizing was PERFECT and loaded them into Dreamweaver one at a time. I created new pages in Dreamweaver and populated them with guide details. I handmade the maps that went along with each country, also in Corel Draw. Each page took about a week to write, create the graphics for, and then slowly assemble in Dreamweaver. Each page was painfully made with love.

Today you can see the guides pages in a flashier, easier to read fashion. And it didn’t take me a week to make each page. All the same text and imagery is there, just in a more readable fashion. We hope you enjoy the conversion.

Mike and I built the ATC website in late 2007 as a means of keeping in contact with our families in America while we lived in Shanghai. In 2009 we traveled for over a year. In 2010 we did the Mongol Rally and then settled again in China. In 2012, we had a baby and returned to the US. All of our years of adventure are on this blog and in these pages, and it’s been fun to have the website grow along with us. To the next few years with the new design– cheers!

Abandon the Cube has undergone changes…for the better we hope. Be the first to check it out! We’re excited about the changes we’ve made and can’t wait for you to browse around the new stuff!

As I said, we added a few new pages– the foremost of which is a page of Top Ten lists about various adventure and travel categories ranging from travel foods and gear to the greatest travel adventurers and most intense adventure rally events. Let us know what you think of the Top Ten page, and if you want to add any lists or suggest list ideas, simply contact us with your ideas.

We also expanded the Events aspect of Abandon the Cube to cover more of the activities ATC participates in, from the Mongol Rally to Habitat for Humanity and teaching English abroad. Its a work in progress but we’re hoping the pages do well and attract a bit of interest. With any luck, we’ll be partnering with some English teaching programs soon to bring you the best information on traveling abroad to teach.

But wait, that’s not all! The website changes are ongoing and comprehensive. We continually update the Most Influential Adventurers page. We’ve added a few more female adventures, an area we were sorely representing previously. Suggest someone for the list by contacting us or leaving a comment be low. We’d be happy to know who you consider the world’s greatest adventurers.

As always, the resources page can help you decide if you want to abandon your cube, how to go about it and a few other odds and ends to help you ATC. We think this is a great place to expand, and we’re always looking for new travel resources and tools to add to this page. If you have suggestions for us, don’t be a strange!– Let us know your thoughts.

Finally, we have a few more destination pages coming soon! We’re excited about uploading new destination pages for the countries we visited while on the 2010 Mongol Rally. Check back soon!

Happy exploring, and let us know what you think of the changes!

We’re busy brainstorming ways to make the Abandon the Cube website more accessible, easier to use, more graphically pleasing and better organized, and we’re hoping you can help us by sending in your ideas. Now you have a chance to help us make the site better. If you have some changes in mind, don’t hesitate to let us know! We know we’re new at this game, so your suggestions and ideas would be appreciated!

Since 2008 we’ve been teaching ourselves (through trial and error) how to make a website, how to market it, and how to maintain a constant level of new content. We’ve learned quite a bit since we first started, and although we’re still learning, we think its time for an overhaul.

Some of the areas we’d like to see revamped include:

• The website logo
• The graphics throughout the site, including specific graphics for each page
• Destination guides with more useful travel information
• More links to useful and related travel or job-quitting websites
• Maps, interactive and informative
• More interactive materials and concepts
• More resources for people hoping to ATC
• A database of information about abandoning the cube
• More films, books, music and TV related to Abandoning the cube

Please don’t hesitate to send us your ideas! Either post them below as a comment or send us an email at atc(at)abandonthecube.com. We are looking forward to hearing your ideas!

We recently watched “Running the Sahara” a documentary about three dudes who literally ran from west to east across the Sahara. After watching that epic tale unfold we thought we’d search for a compiled online list of awesome cube-abandoning stories and adventure tales. After searching for this list for some time, we discovered it does not yet exist and we’d like to compile one to share with the world. Thus, if you have any favorite films about quitting your job to travel, or simply doing an outrageous event like running the Sahara or the Mongol Rally, then submit your ideas and we’ll compile them into, hopefully, a TOP 100 CUBE ABANDONING FILMS list that we’ll be posting on our website. We’d also love to have a similar list about books.

To get you started thinking down the path of media we’re looking for, here are a few of our favorite  lists:

Best cube abandoning films:
• Joe versus the Volcano
• Running the Sahara
• The Razor’s Edge
• 7 Years in Tibet
• Office Space
• The Matrix

And a few cube-abandoning books:
• Shakelton Expedition
• Vagabonding
• Imagine
• Long Way Round

What about a few Road Trip Songs:
• Freebird
• Simple Man
• Free Ride
• Living on a Prayer

Good news for travel buffs, Lonely Planet now has a program that features great travel blogs. This program has exploded in the travel community and you can now see select posts from ATC on related Lonely Planet destination pages. If you have not heard of Lonely Planet, it is a company well known to most travelers for their comprehensive guides that cover nearly 100% of the world (even Antarctica!).  For the international traveler there really is not another guide company that comes close to LP in terms of information at the country and major city level. We use LP guides when traveling abroad, and have quite a collection of their books, including some of their compilation books composed by travelers who have interesting stories to share.

Sunset

Now Abandon the Cube is part of this great endeavor to make travel information more accessible. On each Lonely Planet destination page you’ll find info on each country, including links to our blog, where applicable. There are not alot of people, for example, who have spent significant amounts of time in Turkmenistan, but we have. Thus, our blog adds new information and insight to the Lonely Planet reader. That’s how we help make Lonely Planet better.

If you found our site from Lonely Planet, welcome to ATC! Subscribe to the RSS feed for weekly blogs sent to your email, or you can follow us on facebook and twitter. Alternatively, check out the photo album, our guides, newsletters and info on the 2010 Mongol Rally.

Dear Readers,

Over the last several days / weeks, with faster internet connection and more free time, we have updated the site with several new pages, photos, and buttons. In an attempt to make our site easy to navigate, we would like to inform our readers of these changes.

• Lauren has uploaded several new pictures into our photo album since we have better internet connection right now.
• We have also created a Humor Page, which has a collection of funny pictures and stories from our trip.
• Lauren has designed several Maps of our routes and the ridiculous, but awesome, Pan-Asian circle we are taking.
• We have also added 5 new links to related articles that can be found at the bottom of each post.
• We have added new polls to the website, which can be found on every page with the exception of the blog.  We will update you on the previous polls’ results shortly.

We have also added several new buttons to the front page that link to social network sites like Face Book, Twitter, and our RSS Feed:

We have also been told that there are some problems when viewing the site with Internet Explorer.  First of all, I can’t even express with words how much better Firefox is than IE, but I will do my best to fix this problem with Internet Explorer as soon as possible.

Also, if anyone has any recommendations or suggestions for our site, layout, posts or information,  please either comment on this post or visit our contact page.

Sincerely,

Mike & Lauren