Improvements

Just a few ideas for improvements on the site.

1) Make maps more interactive and easier to use. Also allow for visitors to click on certain listed locations to link to photos and info a particular person has put.

2) Allow for bulk image uploads. There are a few websites that do it whereby you can select a bulk amount of pics to upload at once which saves a lot of time.

Im also finding it hard to edit the map on the top of the page. I initially added a long list of destinations, but they have come up slightly wrong and now I dont know how to change it.

Cheers

Brodie

written by

Brodie on April 2, 2007

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the maps could use a bit of attention. When you're looking at a user profile for instance, you see all these little comment and photo icons on the map, but clicking them doesn't do anything. Like you say, it's pretty obvious what should be happening, but it's not. Gotta fix that!

As to bulk-uploading photos, the reason I've held off on that for so long is mostly philosophical rather than technical. This post should give some background on my motives:

http://www.blogabond.com/CommentView.aspx?CommentID=724

I actually have a little bulk uploader built and ready to go, but I'm hesitant to make it public for the reasons outlined in that post. Maybe a good solution would be to let users "earn" access to the tool by contributing a bunch of useful content and photos to the site. Once they've established that they're not going to upload 2000 pictures of their dog, I'd be more likely to trust them with bulk upload ability.

It's strange running a free service like this. Many of the issues you face in trying to make it work the way you want aren't technical, but rather social. Tweak the knobs too far in one direction and you get MySpace. Tweak them the other way and you get Flickr. Fortunately for me, I get lots of good feedback from users like yourself to help me make those adjustments. Sounds like I might need to nudge the "Photo" knob a bit to the left.

Thanks again for your input!

Jason

written by

Jason Kester on April 2, 2007

Oh, and in answer to your last question, you'll find a link labeled "add and rearrange stops with the TripBuilder" hidden somewhere near the top of this page:

http://www.blogabond.com/TripView.aspx?tripID=704

That will throw you back into the map builder and let you add, delete and re-order the places on your map.

written by

Jason Kester on April 2, 2007

Hey Jason, thanks for the reply.

I must say, I do see your point for not allowing bulk photo downloads. The site will be a lot more effective when people can browse through the highlights, and not every trigger happy shot thats been taken.
Seeing as you're pretty open to suggestions, i have a few more for you to ponder. I've only just started using this, so its probably best to take these with a grain of salt.

1) More customisation of our profiles. Things like background colours, layout, etc... It doesnt have to be anything crazy, but it would be cool to be able to change.

2) A section where we can put links to external pages would be cool as well. Such things as Flickr (would make it easier for people to see large quantities of photos), myspace, youtube (where we may have uploaded video), and other helpful links to things that people find while they're traveling (cheap accom, food, attractions...etc)

3) I recon a contents page for peoples blog entries would be quite useful. For example, I'll be stopping at a lot of places in the states and writing a lot of entries for that trip, and I think it would be easier to have some sort of a contents page at the top so family and friends can find out what I did in Vegas a month ago without having to scroll through 5 pages of entries. Maybe you already have this, and I just haven't got it figured out yet.

4) A subscription thingy so friends and fam are automatically notified by email when new photos, or blogs are posted. I think this would be a great feature.

5) Albums for photos would be a great feature. Also making the albums so they can be linked, or attached to a certain blog would be good. Say someone was reading my Vegas blog and they wanted to see some of the pics, they could just click on the link up near the blog title, or something like that.

I'm also still finding the map a little tricky to get the hang of. My American route I had set up keeps changing. I think its because the dates are in the future and its getting confused.

Also, how do you control what appears on the map of my homepage. I know my american trip displays the american route, but the one on my homepage im not sure how to change it.

I must say that when I was searching for sites that I could use to post my activities, this one was far better than most of the others out there. And the fact that you're so open to input from others really puts you a cut above.

Thanks for the great site which I cant wait to start using once I actually get on the road.

Cheers

Brodie

written by

Brodie on April 3, 2007

Damn. That's a pile of good ideas. A little list of cities at the top of your blog that you can click on to filter down... Autospam... yeah.

And you actually predicted one of the feature I've had in the hopper for a while now. Soon you'll be able to do little Yelp-style reviews of places and things. So if you manage to find a cheap, clean, rat-free guesthouse on Ko San Road you can tell people about it.

Jason

written by

Jason Kester on April 14, 2007

Oh, as to maps on your Profile page...

The more feedback I get from users, the more it looks like we need some way of customizing the map that shows on your homepage:

- how many places to show/how far back in time to go
- autozoom into where I am now, or stay a bit further out.
- maybe restrict to a single trip, or show your full history.

Right now, it uses an algorithm that tries to show where you are and some of where you've been. Unfortunately, some people write lots of stuff before they leave so it stays zoomed in on their home town. Or maybe they write tons of small entries every day, so the map only goes back a couple weeks. Or maybe they decide to ride their bike across the sahara and stick in Every Small Village along the way, resulting in a map with 500 points on it (thanks again for the load test, Roel!)

It's just not that easy to have a single algorithm that works for every scenario. Maybe it would be best just to let you pick.

Let me know what you guys think.

Jason

written by

Jason Kester on April 14, 2007

Hi Jason,

My wife and I started using Blogabond for our one-year road trip, but have since moved over to Blogger because we want quite a bit of customisation built into our blog.

Nonetheless, your map feature is still a mainstay on the new blog.

Having now traveled on to South America, We find that our map is still resolutely centred on the North American continent.

It's been a long time since this conversation stopped, but I hope you might have some time to look into this.

Thanks so much for a great tool!

written by Dannie on July 25, 2009

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Heading South?