RSS feeds, low graphics, markup, export

Hi Jason

I found your site looking for a Google Maps itinerary creator, and yours is excellent, as is the whole site. A few suggestions

1) As many users will be accessing the site while travelling in the 3rd world, could you give an option so they can switch off the graphic banners, which while pretty would be slow to download

2) You have an RSS feed for the site as a whole, could you set one up per user?

3) Could you add entry markup for bold etc, perhaps using the Mediawiki conventions of bold etc
if you want to avoid html. Their way of having icons at the top of the page to select features is slick too

4) In the long term, you want to offer the ability to export blogs as data files, as people will be reluctant to add too much content without the ability to archive it.

Good luck with the site, it might tempt me away from LiveJournal for my forthcoming 6 month trip to South America

John

written by

vicarage on October 6, 2007

Hey, welcome aboard! You bring up a few things that I've been thinking about for a while now:

1. We used to actually have this feature (with our old, crappy look), where the site would collapse itself down to fit inside 800x600 browsers. (which now account for about 5% of our traffic, so we don't do that anymore). I've always wanted to sniff for bandwidth though, and throttle down the graphics that get sent.

Lately I've been trying to get the page sizes down all across the site, but still there are things that you just want ripped out when you're sitting at a dial-up connection in Laos. I'll get on it!

2. Done. Sorta. You can get RSS feeds for anything, but as of today, there are no links for them and no instructions. I could never find a good non-intrusive place to cram the "geek stuff", where it wouldn't confuse your mom when she came in to read your blog. Here are a couple feeds for you and your stuff:

http://www.blogabond.com/rss/rss.aspx?userID=1744
http://www.blogabond.com/rss/rss.aspx?tripID=1526

Simple, eh? Sure... If you're me. I'll get links in for that stuff.

3. Got the code sitting there ready to go. You'll be happy to know that I've left it out thus far because I couldn't decide where to put the Instructions link. Smart. I'll flip it on this afternoon.

4. Ahead of you there too. There's actually a Blogger importer/exporter sitting around gathering dust. I could never come up with a good way to handle the [import ... modify_here and modify_there ... import_again] synchronization scenarios, so I let it slide. Of course, the smart move would be to just accept that it will write over everything each time, but I got caught up in details and eventually lost interest. If I find time, I'll dust it off and do an HTML export as well.

But yeah, I agree that a "Gimme Back My Stuff" button is pretty important to keep people from feeling locked in.

Anyway, have a great time in South America! That's the one continent I'm still missing, so I need all the good inspiration I can get. Thanks again for keeping me motivated to continue adding features to the site!

Jason

written by

Jason Kester on October 8, 2007

OK, 2 and 3 are up and running.

Now you can write ransom note style blog entries thanks to a few select wiki-markup features. I think I'll let people discover it on their own for a while, to guage the reaction to it and see how it looks in the context of blog entries.

RSS feeds for people and trips are live too, and living in a little box with some other web2.0 stuff that can be safely ignored by most people.

Thanks again for kicking me into action. With luck, your other suggestions will trickle in before too long.

Jason

written by

Jason Kester on October 8, 2007

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RSS feeds, low graphics, markup, export

OK, 2 and 3 are up and running.

Heading South?