Great work!

Just wanted to post a couple of lines in order to congrat you on a job perfectly done! The map creation/edition is absolutely genius, and really straightforward. I am entering all my previous travels, my current ones, and planning the soon to be made ones (hopefully!).

A couple of things that I thinks could make even better the site:

- Ability to look for blogs in a specific language. This could really make the Blogabond community more "international" and spread its use. Also, Blogabond translation could really work well here.

- The layout is great, and the picture in the top section is really nice. Perhaps you should allow users to upload pictures and to tag them as to be selected to appear randomly on the top picture section of all the web pages.

- As in Blogger, I think their top navigation bar is really useful. You could browse other blogs (with ,say, next/random/similar buttons). This adds to the experience and can lead the Bloggers and Visitors alike to discover new exciting blogs and meet new people around.

- A nice to have feature, would be to have a basic "friends" circle module (similar to MySpace, Hi5, etc.) targeted to Travel.

- Since Blogabond is specifically focused on traveling, it would be nice that you had a specific section on valuable travel information, resources, etc. You could encourage expert or hardcore users to fill it up with useful information.

- Ability to have a slideshow of pictures on the side tab of the Blog.

- In the map making section, I think there is a bug, that prevents the left panel (where all the locations are) to be shown. Sometimes, that panel does not appear at all, and I have to reload the page several times in order for the panel to appear.

Well, thanks a million again for an excellent (and most useful) site. Keep up the great work!!!!

Best regards from Colombia, South America.

written by Gregorio A. on April 11, 2007

Wow. This week has been a good one for feedback.

I've been thinking a lot about internationalization lately. If you watch the RSS feed, you'll see that nearly a quarter of the entries these days are in a language other than English. I added support for Right-To-Left languages recently, but I think it's time to look into translating the entire site into a few different languages.

After English, our most popular languages (among readers) are Turkish, French, German and Spanish. Yes, Turkish. Evidently we show up for searches on remote Turkish villages a lot. Among writers, I see a lot of Spanish, French and Dutch (and one high profile Italian at the moment). It would be nice to have Translate buttons on these posts. I'll have to look into Google's offerings in this area. It shouldn't be too hard.

I definately agree that we need a way for users to upload photos for the header. I'm getting tired of looking at the same thing all the time. And I'm kicking myself for making the photo resizer crop everything down to 800 pixels wide, so that I can't even use people's stuff if I want to. I'll have to get a tool up to upload and crop potential header photos.

Also in the Photo category, yeah, Next and Previous buttons are a definite must. And thumbnails along the bottom to make the photo viewer into a true slideshow would be a real improvement. Right now the photos are just not as far along as I want them to be.

Anyway, all the features that you (and everybody else) have been asking for are going into the Blogabond Bug Tracker. It's sad to say that I'm a bit swamped with other work at the moment, so it might be a while before I can do anything about some of this stuff. But keep telling me things you see that could use improvement. It's really helping the site to become more useful.

(Honest! You should have seen the place before people started suggesting things!)

Jason

written by

Jason Kester on April 14, 2007

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Heading South?