Got back last night to clean streets and quiet sleep. Nice...

written by  Jason Kester on July 16, 2007 from Rodellar, Spain
from the travel blog: Living in Spain
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Taken out by the Vaca

It's a pretty simple game, really:

1. See how close you can get to the Rampaging Bull

2. Attract the attention of the Rampaging Bull to impress your friends.

3. Land.

4. Try to get up and escape before the Rampaging Bull tosses you again.

5. See how far you can remain from the Rampaging Bull.

Aqua! Aqua!

Day One of San Fermines was Huge. Thousands of wassailing wastrels in red and white packing the back alleys of the old town. Elbow to elbow carnage of spilled drinks and shouted enthusiasm. I need new clothes!

The Blogabond She-Squad in Full Pout!

After a late night, we were all up bright and early for the Running of the Bulls. Carnage ensued, and eventually we made it back to the place in search of siesta.

If you're not yet in Pamplona, get here. Now. I'll buy you a drink (or at least dump one over your head).

written by  Jason Kester on July 6, 2007 from Pamplona, Spain
from the travel blog: Living in Spain
tagged SanFermin and Fiesta
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First, it always bugged me that when you clicked on "Photos", you didn't get to see any Photos. Just a bunch of links. That was lame. So yeah, we need to put some pictures up there, but which ones? I dunno. Guess we can't do that until we do...

And finally, I've messed with the discussion forums a bit so that people can actually figure out what they do. Try it out. Click the "Talk" link up top and ask your fellow Blogabonders a question. I bet you'll get a few replies.

Anyway, let me know if you like any of this new stuff. And hey, I'm off to Europe in a few days. If you're touring around France, Switzerland or Italy, let me know!

written by  Jason Kester on April 22, 2007 from Portland, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond, Photos and Community
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I've been quietly putting new features live for the last few months, and leaving them out there for you all to discover. So you may have noticed that your blog entries are autosaving themselves behind the scenes, that you can hide your draft entries until you're ready for the world to see them, and that you can add new places to the world map.

But this week, I finally got around to putting up a few major features that have been in the hopper for a long time. Blogabond was always intended to be a place for Independent Travelers to hang out and share stories, but until recently it's been sorta tough to get a conversation going with anybody on the site. Sure, you could leave comments on one of their posts, but unless they happened to check it they might never see it. And if they replied to you, how would you know?

So now, everybody gets a little Mail link next to their name. You can send private messages to anybody on the site. If you've got an account, you can check out your Inbox under the My Stuff tab, and if you've given us your Email address we'll even forward along any direct communication that you receive. So if you read my entry about Monkey Bay, Malawi and want to know if it's worth going, you can shoot me off a private message and ask me about it.

We've also got Buddies now. You've seen this idea before, so I don't need to go into detail, but yeah, you can now start collecting friends on the site and keeping tabs on what they're up to. Less digging around trying to find stuff. Thus, more better.

There's another feature teetering at the brink of being pushed live that will let you compliment users on their cool blog entries and photos. Once we get a bunch of votes for stuff, I'll probably scrap the idea of "Featured Whatever" and just let you guys decide what belongs on the Home page by voting on it. So if you want to displace The Hulk from his seat of glory, you can organize all your friends to come onto the site and vote on all your stuff. (Or I guess you could also just let the system work itself out so that things floated to the top on their own merit. But that might not be as much fun.)

Anyway, thanks again for helping to make Blogabond a reality. Keep up the suggestions!

Jason

written by  Jason Kester on March 21, 2007 from Los Angeles, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond, Community and Buddies
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"As though I wanted will meet personally the author of clauses articles on your site, and personally to it him will get acquainted. But unfortunately I live in other country and I have no an opportunity to go on the world. Success to you the dear expensive friend. "

It looks like the SpamBots have finally found the comment links on Blog entries.

This one was especially fun, as it started out by simply commenting on a dozen different blogs, praising the author's "clauses" and offering ESL advice on how to better the world.

Then it started including helpful links to Porn.

I've put up a simple spam filter that should stop this sort of thing from clogging up the comments in the future. There's an off-chance that some of you may have trouble posting comments if you don't have Javascript enabled on your browser. Keep me posted if you notice anything strange.

Anyway, I've gone ahead and left a few of the more harmless comments to a few people's blogs. So if you're lucky, you might get an inspirational message like this in your comments:

"How many I was in a network the Internet, but your site my loved liked,favourite! Thanks."

Consider it a gift from the (hopefully) short-lived Astroturfing SpamBot!

written by  Jason Kester on November 15, 2006 from Portland, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond and Spam
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