Dave and Joanna first had the idea to do a travel blog way back in 2016 when they got back from their trip to Iceland. Originally, they were going to call it "Murdered the Language with an Axe" to remind themselves of trying to pronounce Icelandic place names, and the reaction of the locals to it.
Dave even went as far as trying to design a logo with the look and feel of vintage travel postcards. The project just sat there for a long time doing nothing, and we let the domain registration lapse. In April of 2024, Dave and Joanna took a cruise to see the total solar eclipse, and decided to pick up the project again, this time, calling it Our Travel Home. We both love spending time in Mexico, so we went ahead and registered ourtravelhome.casa. It was a bit of a slow burn until Dave recently found himself with extra time on his hands, and he dove back into the project with new energy.
Along the way, Joanna came to the conclusion that she wasn't going to be making very many posts, so we made the decision to invite select friends who love to travel as much as we do to post about their adventures. We've decided to call ourselves "Travel Hosts", so sit back, put your feet up, and come see the world with us!
- Technologies Used
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Our Travel Home was originally built using Drupal 8 and was later upgraded to Drupal 11. The site uses a custom theme based on the Clean Blog Theme, which Dave forked from the Classic Blog Theme when it didn't offer support for Drupal 11.
All of the site assets (core imagery, css, javascript, templates and custom code) is maintained in a repository hosted by GitHub. We use a GitHub Actions workflow for a CI/CD pipeline that continually updates the staging server whenever new items are pushed up to GitHub.
The site is hosted on a VPS from NameCheap on Ubuntu Linux using Nginx, MariaDB and a TLS/SSL certificate from LetsEncrypt.