I live in the Philippines and the DSL can get slow. The Google Map on the banner can take a long time to load. Can you make this an option instead so viewers don't have wait too long to see the page. It refreshes too when you move around so more waiting.

On the map, the utility to create maps is too cumbersome. I would like to create a map specific to a trip without the other clutter there. Is this possible?

Upon entering the site, blog entries are immediately displayed below making some people thing that these are the actual blogs skipping the index above. They do not even contain the introduction to the entries which would speak of the entire trip. Could we just list the excerpts (like first 5 lines or so) of the introduction of the trips there instead of the blog entries themselves?

People can't send me mail without signing up first? Why? I understand that you want to get more people to sign up but this is just a barrier for people like me to get mail from friends and from others who want to do more than comment.

Otherwise, great job.

Joey Carlotta

written by  Joey Carlotta on May 10, 2008

Hey, thanks for that! I agree that the site is a bit painful to load over a slow connection. It's actually not the maps that slow it down, but rather the photos on the page that have to load. The map will simply wait until everything else on the page has finished loading, and then do it's thing. Of course, that means it sits there looking slow for a while and therefore gets the blame.

I'll look into ways to improve the appearance of speed on the blog pages. This will probably mean drawing the maps a bit earlier and waiting not bothering to load any photos at the bottom of the page until you actually scroll down to them. I've been meaning to get to this for a while now, so thanks for reminding me!

I'm afraid that the email thing may have to stay like it is though. Unfortunately, blog sites are a big target for spammers these days, so any feature that allows email to be sent to real people is likely to get exploited. Already, we get up to 1000 attempts every day to send mail and add spam comments to our users. So, while it's no fun to have to make an account just to send mail, it's one of the only ways that we can ensure it's human beings and not automated spam robots sending those messages. Sorry about that one!

Jason

written by  Jason Kester on May 11, 2008

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Thanks, Jason!

written by  Joey Carlotta on May 11, 2008

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