Lesson One: Nobody Reads Instructions!
This was our first real mistake. Our screens were easy enough to use, but you really needed to read the little block of text up top to know what you were supposed to do. Even the fact that the "Countries In View" list next to the map could be scrolled off the screen caused a few users to wonder why they couldn't pick Thailand off the list when they were zoomed in on Central America.

Lucky for us, the changes we needed to make were pretty minor. The big explanatory paragraphs are all either gone, or moved down out of the way, in favor of big simple taglines. Gone are the references to Travel Journals, Trip Reports and Diaries. Now it's all Travel Blogs and Blog entries.

Lesson Two: If it looks clickable, it better work!
We have big ideas here. There are plenty of new features on the way, so we mock up all our screens to incorporate those features. The only problem is that users see a link saying "0 photos", and expect to be able to click on it to get to the page where they can view those zero photos. It never would have occurred to me to do that!

So this was another easy fix. We went through and lopped off anything that's not fully built. And in a few cases, we just cranked overnight and made those features work. So now, if you click on something, you can be assured you'll go somewhere.

written by  Jason Kester on October 17, 2005 from Pasadena, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond
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Digging around in the data, I managed to find a dozen or so mistakes, usually where a longitude of -97.115 would end up as 97.115 or 9.7115. Luckily, most were tiny villages that could simply be plucked off the map and never missed. We also had to deal with countries like Russia, which are far enough North that they actually span most of the globe.

Anyway, most of it is fixed now. Though just yesterday I got an email wondering why 'Centering' on New Zealand would show you a blowup of the Indian Ocean. Slowly, slowly, it's all starting to come together.

written by  Jason Kester on October 18, 2005 from Pasadena, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
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Photos are also getting easier to manage by the day. With luck, we'll have Tagging in place for photos and comments soon. For now though I'm having to deal with silly things like making the site "search engine friendly", and other minor technical details that keep me away from actually making the site better.

There's also a new design on the way. Sad news I know for those of you in love with grey boxes and oversized fonts. But we live in a visual world, my friends. And looking at the competition it is clear that we simply cannot hang unless we clean the look up a bit.

written by  Jason Kester on October 19, 2005 from Pasadena, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond and Forums
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We're really going to need a way for users to add their own locations to the map. And while we're at it, we should probably add the concept of aliases for places we know about. The town of Abu Zaby shows up right in the center of Dubai if you zoom in on the map. It would be nice if our application knew they were the same place.

But wait, it gets worse! Cairo and Alexandria are missing too. The tiny oasis of Al Qasr is there, but the two largest cities in the country are just plain gone. Not acceptable. We're going to have to find a better dataset.

Oh yeah, I can zoom into my hotel in Cairo and see the name of the neighborhood. But the city is not there. And it claims that Italy, Russia and the Seychelles are in view!

Ah ha! Turns out in my initial import, I neglected to include capital cities!

written by  Jason Kester on October 26, 2005 from Phoenix, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged CertainDeath and Blogabond
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Tonsai Offices, 2003

You'll find this claim on just about every travel site out there, but if you dig around you'll also probably find a mailing address in Oakland or some other non-exotic location. There's an office there, staffed with anywhere between a half dozen and a few hundred people, most of whom have never been outside the United States. This is not unexpected, since any place that actually hired dirtbag travelers as its staff would have such high turnover that it would never get anything done.

With Blogabond.com, I'm hoping to make that "by travelers" claim a reality. As I write this, I'm sitting at a guesthouse off Khoa San road in Bangkok, nursing a Beer Chang and working out the details on how not to get my laptop stolen when I head out to Cambodia tomorrow. I'll be on the road for the better part of a year this time around, and with luck I'll find enough time to work this site into presentable shape by the time I'm done.

I just pushed a new build live that addresses a few minor bug fixes and finally adds the ability to comment on other people's trip reports. In the next few weeks, you can expect to see enhancements to make the Maps a bit more usable, and a new, more elegant design. So if you're a big fan off grey boxes and photos of cows, best speak up now because they will soon be a thing of the past!

written by  Jason Kester on December 3, 2005 from Bangkok, Thailand
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
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On Tyrolean Air, 7c

The site had been live for about 3 months at this point, and was finally starting to attract a few actual users. I'd been intentionally keeping a low profile, and letting people find the place on their own. As Joel ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ ) says, "when you get premature publicity, lots of people check out your thing, and it's not done yet, so now most of the people that tried your thing think it's lame, and now you have two problems: your thing is lame and everybody knows it."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/02/08.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/11/02.html

Off Tyrolean Air, 7c

So, with the promise of another couple weeks client work (for real money), I booked a crazy plush holiday flat in Noosa Heads for myself and the lovely miss Helen. Bought some surfboards, wrote some code, surfed a bunch, lived large. Bought a cheap van off an English chick, threw a bit more money at it so that it might actually run, and headed South in search of right point breaks and wireless hotspots named Linksys and Default.

The Oz Hooptie

Once we made it to Sydney, the surfboards got stashed in the back and the climbing gear came back out. Spent a week in the Blue Mountains and another at Nowra, clipping bolts with friends met in Thailand. Finally, we limped the van down to Melbourne and passed it off to a friend, who managed to get it halfway back across town before it died a painful death in the middle of rush hour traffic.

written by  Jason Kester on March 1, 2006 from Noosa Heads, Australia
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Climbing, Surfing, Blogabond and Hooptie
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Well, first off, we didn't actually have tickets to England. Just a return flight from Melbourne to Bangkok via Singapore. So that's 11 hours plus 7 hours for those of you keeping score. Once in BKK, we cleared customs with all our gear and a surfboard, and proceeded to try to book the rest of our trip home. According to every travel agent we'd talked to in Australia, "There is no such thing as standby anymore." "You need to have a confirmed reservation from a travel agent to board a flight." That's not actually the case, but good on ya, travel agents, for trying to sell us a full-fare last minute ticket!

We ended up with a sketchy, over-padded, wait-listed itinerary onward to Birmingham, with nothing more than a handwritten credit card receipt in Thai Baht to keep us from being booted onto the street in Amsterdam. I guess the nice thing about post 9/11 travel is that if you somehow manage to get a standby ticket, you'll be the only one on the waiting list. The desk in Amsterdam had no idea what to do with us, so they just stuck on a plane and had us stand around until a couple seats freed up.

So, add in another two flights at 14 hours and 2 hours, followed by another customs line with a surfboard and a 4 hour drive to Wales. That leaves us awake for a little over two days altogether, which may not be a record or anything, but it's not bad considering that this blog is supposed to be about writing software.

written by  Jason Kester on May 1, 2006 from Aberdyfi, United Kingdom
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Flight and Blogabond
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