2) Say there's a fictional town called Derkaderka, Derkistan. It has 0 blog posts and 0 photos. When I click on "Add your photos" to Derkaderka (since i've visited there so often) and upload pics and click finish, you're redirected to a page with zero relevance to what you just did. The redirect link after photo uploads should be directly to the new "tag name and edit your photos" page. (think facebook). Also a delete button (just in case, haha).

3) Break down really really long trips into pages. (say, 10-15 posts per page, just like on blogs). This can't be too hard, either. Just loading all 357 pictures and 84 blog posts on someone's trip takes a good long while.

4) A sweet favicon would look pretty awesome.

5) Maybe it's just me, but Firefox doesn't like the Trip Builder and the "Mo' Big" button. IE, for some weird reason, actually works better here.

6) After logging in, it should redirect you to "My Stuff". Put the "spread the word" message on the bottom of that page if you must, but it's just another click that could be saved by a few keystrokes.

7) "Find Places" on right toolbar should have an AJAX-powered search system that pulls up the most relevant cities/countries (as is demonstrated so beautifully by the Trip Builder and tagging photos).

8) AUTOSAVE blog entries. Some AJAX trickery would do WONDERS to those of us in shady 3rd world countries with even shadier internet connections trying to update our friends and family back home. I bet you if you asked the number of Blogabond users who have lost entire posts because of crappy connections, crappy computers, or foreign keyboards, you'd be surprised.

9) When writing a blog entry, a little pull-down menu up top that narrowed down pictures by Trip would be clever. Not really that much useful for most people as the newer pictures naturally correlate with a new blog post, though. Maybe a popup windown when you click "upload photos" instead of navigating away from your blog entry? I don't know what would be more efficient and user-friendly.

Anyways, these are some of my CONSTRUCTIVE criticisms to make Blogabond the best it can be. You really have something here, and I want to really see it blossom into something even more amazing.

written by  dannydickman on March 9, 2007

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Cool. Thanks for the feedback! I agree that some of the edit pages dump you off into strange places when you're done. I'll definately retarget the Photo Uploader like you suggest.

On to your items:

1. In the entire history of this web site, exactly one person has ever found the Photo Delete button. And I think I may have told him where it was! Probably time to stick delete buttons in a more prominant place (on the tagger/manager sounds good.)

3. Yeah, some of those blogs are enormous. I've been meaning to add paging to them for a while now. It's an easy fix, so I guess it's time to quit being lazy and do it.

4. Hmm. Maybe you've never seen me try to draw stuff. Thus far, my single greatest graphical accomplishment has been drawing the rounded rectangle that the site content sits inside!

5. Really? Thought I'd fixed that. There. Does now.

7. Yeah. You click that link and it just takes you to a lame page without even a search box. Gotta do something about that...

8. It actually does autosave your blog entries as you type. Once a minute, it will phone home and background save your entry. So if they have to pop in a new AOL CD at the internet Cafe, you'll be covered. Check out the bottom of the Entry Text box, right above the "No Html" message. That's where the AutoSave message will pop in when it happens.

9. Yeah, that was one of the first items on the TODO list, and it's been there over a year. Somehow I never get around to putting it in. Sure would be handy though.

Anyway, thanks for the input. It's great to get feedback from real people using the site. And hey, it looks like we might overlap in Spain this summer. Let me know when you get near Barcelona. I might be able to offer you a house to crash at.

Jason

written by  Jason Kester on March 9, 2007

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