Prepare yourself to learn a little bit about me, a little bit about this site, and a little bit of its history. Please, please, please take the time to read the section towards the end on comments and linking because a lot of people who try to contact me don’t appear to. Thank you in advance for getting ready to close this browser tab before reading any further.
All content on this site – written and photographic, unless specifically stated otherwise – is by me, and I’m Mark. The primary purpose of this website is to document the travelling experiences of me and my wife and for that purpose you can typically find other content shared socially across the web under the name Mark & Marie’s Travels (mostly just on Instagram now, to be fair, after the whole Elon Musk’s infantile business dipshittery ruining Twitter). We own our own home, we don’t have kids, never wanted them, will never have them. This means we have some money to splurge on travel but because of that pesky work thing we’re still limited in just how much of it we can do and when. What we’ve discovered is that we really, really like to take cruise holidays and because we’ve got some splashing cash we also like to take excursions on cruise holidays. So, while this site won’t exclusively feature that particular form of travelling all over the world you will find that the vast majority of trips covered probably happen while we’re at sea.
If you wanted to know what makes our content stand out from other cruise bloggers then I’d say that we tend to travel farther afield and we tend to spend money on trips when we get there; my write-ups tend towards the more verbose, concentrating on individual aspects of port experiences in a travel diary or travelogue style rather than simple overviews of visits or top tips for places; my posts are photo-heavy because I like to take a lot of photographs and I see no reason not to share them; my posts may contain swearing and what I consider humour because I swear a lot and think I’m funny.
This site is primarily for me and my wife. It’s for our memories. It’s also for anyone else who wants to see snapshots of our travelling life or read a diary of a cruise or visit to somewhere in particular and live vicariously through us but that’s just a by-product. Posts are honest. If everything in the world was amazing then nothing would be amazing. Posts aren’t written to get freebies from companies. There are no affiliate links these days. You won’t find adverts. You won’t get pressured to sign up for a newsletter. You should never see a pop-up. Clickbaity titles and lazy, listed content will be kept to a minimum.
This focus for the website on us and our memories exposed publicly carries on through to social media platforms where, generally, a link will be provided to new content when it appears or mentioned if it helps someone out with a query. What won’t happen is a constant flood of links to content, new or old, because driving web traffic numbers is not what I’m interested in. I like to think that my writing is detailed and useful and that my photos are representative of the life and travel experiences we have. I firmly support making content freely available and discoverable and reusable with attribution which is why the use of walled garden environments such as Facebook is kept to a minimum and simply used to provide another avenue to the main repository of travel information: this website.
You’ll be told if photos aren’t taken by us. Generally-speaking you can consider all content on this site covered under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence. This means that in most instances you can share posts and/or images written by me on your own website or in print format or any other medium (even commercially) so long as you give attribution to me or my website and as long as you make it clear that what you then publish has the same licence. If you’re unsure or if you’d like to discuss terms for licencing content differently then please contact me (see below) and if you do share anything then also please contact me (because I’d like to know and it’s the nice thing to do).
If you like what I write and the photos I take then great, come back soon, maybe subscribe to the RSS feed. If not… well, you’re hardly likely to be reading this right now if that’s the case.
History
The domain was registered in 2000 as a means to have control over emails and not rely on other providers who had a habit of folding back in those days. The name came from a simple desire to have something that could potentially be turned into a logo should we ever think of something to do with the site. There were fewer top level domains and all the good names had gone by 2000 so this was amongst the best that was left from combining words in the dictionary.
This site has had many designs and purposes over the years but for the vast majority of it has been an E/N site. That’s an actual thing and you can look it up. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine will also show you snapshots of the many guises of the website over the years if you’re insanely curious as to what gibberish I used to write and what porn affiliates I used to link to. It’s quite the trip down memory lane for me; I imagine you couldn’t care less. The most recent incarnation of this site prior to narrowing the focus on travel can be found here: neOnbubble Archive.
The combination of struggling to come up with original rants and stories, the explosion of crappy content and saturation of the web by people (urgh!), and finding enough time in the day saw the end of the great, rambling, incoherent E/N period and the arrival of the current form: a great, rambling, incoherent travel and photography diary.
Comments
Leave a comment if you like but know this: I might edit your comment. Yes, it’s your comment, but this is my site, and that’s the rule here. The reason for me editing your comment might be to remove something that gives away personal information (you’d be surprised how many people think this is a travel-booking website and post their addresses and phone numbers). The reason might be because you’re saying something that’s untrue. While I like a good argument in general I’ve found that internet ones don’t work out because people aren’t open to changing their minds when presented with evidence counter to their point of view. So, if you are thinking about saying something like “cruise ships are bad for the virus” but don’t back that up with links to support that and to show that they’re worse than, say, schools or offices or gyms etc. then don’t expect your comment to stick around. And the reason I might edit your comment is to make you look more like a dick because you’ve said something dickish. I usually won’t have to do that because you’ll have done it yourself, but just know it’s a possibility.
And now a caveat about comments. This site uses Akismet to detect spam and it does a great job but it sometimes deletes comments that are genuine and I only check the bin about once a month on average. I might not see your comment at all. So, you know, don’t get pissy if I don’t reply or approve what you wrote or whatever. Or do get pissy. You know what? You act however you want. Just know that there might be a reason beyond me being a dick, as unlikely as that seems.
Link Exchanges and Guest Articles
The short answer to this is No.
That’s No.
I’m going to explain a little more because overly wordy explanations is my bag, baby, but just to make it clear one more time: No.
I get quite a few requests for these that I either don’t spot for ages since they’re flagged as spam (people not on your contacts list emailing with links in their first exchange really don’t understand modern email filtering) or which seem utterly useless.
I get it. I really do. You have a website with a DA of something and you’re interested in getting a link from my site to yours because it helps you, and maybe you can offer me a link back in return somewhere? Except it doesn’t help the people for whom this site is written which, as you’ll see above where I talk about this, is me and my wife. I don’t care about where I’m ranked for keywords. I don’t mind people finding this site – and clearly the people wanting links have done so – but I’m not putting in effort to outsmart an algorithm that changes with the wind because the reward isn’t worth the time and research needed. I don’t have adverts so I don’t have any obsession with pageview numbers or any inclination to rewrite for specific phrases just to get improved visibility and potential click-throughs or advert impressions. I left all that behind in the early 2000s.
But, with all that being said, if you’ve got a similar writing style – I like genuine travelogues; I like a bit of honesty and humour; I like things that aren’t just Best Things To Do In X or Top Tips For Visiting Y – then feel free to contact me. If I think that the sort of person who actually likes what I write (almost nobody) might like what you’ve written then I absolutely will consider linking from a relevant spot. Otherwise… I’m probably just going to ignore you. Please don’t take it personally.
I am far, far, far more likely to pay attention to what you’ve written and to link to you without you even asking if I spot an inbound referral from your site first. This isn’t a way to encourage exchanges – I swear – but it’s because I am old school and I am a big fan of the unsolicited, helpful-to-be-helpful, open approach to this grand web of knowledge. I don’t care about web traffic numbers because they’re transient, but I do care who’s writing about what and the sort of things they think their readers might find useful or interesting, and if that’s me and my writing then, well, everyone’s got an ego they like stroking every once in a while.
Photo Licencing
I’ve had requests for photo licencing from commercial interests. I won’t say I’m not interested but if what you’re offering is going to be a small amount of money in exchange for a dozen emails, several forms to sign, and eternal access over a broad range of possible uses then I’m going to decline because it’s simply not worth the effort for me. This is true for any company, and it’s ridiculously true for absolutely huge ones with monstrous profits. You know who you are.
Contact Me
This is my domain. Emails sent to my first name at my domain will get to me. If you don’t use my name then I won’t see the email. If you don’t use my domain then somebody else might.
You can also find me in various places on social networks and those are linked elsewhere on this page.
If everything else fails then just leave a comment on a post somewhere. Nothing is published unless I approve it so what you post won’t be seen by anyone else. So long as you don’t post anything that gets automatically flagged as spam or suspicious then I will take a look at it and I’ll either get back to you or I won’t.