Jan 2007

Wowsers, what a day! Well, actually yesterday was some day in terms of members with 164 new members signing up. That breaks the last record by 14, so nice to see improvement like that Today should be pretty similar though based on the count so far, but if we break the record again, I promise not to post about it. It's pretty cool, as back when we first started I remember having a record week with 200 or so new members after we were featured on a BBC World show 7 times in one week. Now that's nearly a normal day

More interesting though, is that the forums hit post number 200 000. Hien was of course quick to point out this had been hit some time ago based on postid alone, but today was the day it was officially registered due to posts being deleted when creating/testing the forum and of course due to deleted posts...

It's also the first day I've noticed over 100 blog entries in a day!

There you have it, of interest to absolutely no one but us stats people and TP admin

Oh, and Peter, Happy Birthday!

Forbes recently compiled its Top 10 destinations for 2007. Meanwhile on Travellerspoint, there's a popular thread going about where people are travelling this year.

The obvious question being, are Travellerpointers and Forbians (what do you call a Forbes reader?) travelling the same places this year?

No.

So far, no one who has listed their itinerary for 2007 in the Travellerspoint thread has said they're planning to go to the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Seychelles, Oman, Panama or Ethiopia, all of which are on the Forbes list.

At Travellerspoint, according to this particularly flawed way of conducting an accurate survey, we're especially keen on England, Ireland, Thailand and the USA.

The most likely place where a Travellerspointer and a Forbian might share a beer this year is Sri Lanka...

Some updating to the video area today. Amongst others, we have added Travelistic as a video provider. This is great, because Travelistic focuses on travel videos and has some good content, including videos sourced from the Thirsty Traveller TV show amongst others.

Inserting a Travelistic video is as simple as inserting a video from iFilm or YouTube, which are also supported in our blogs. Simply click on the VIDEO button when you are writing a new entry, select your provider of choice from the window that pops up, enter the video id and hit insert.

The result, for example for a Travelistic video, will be this;

Seeing as it's already the 19th of January and there's still a few calendars lying around here in the office, we're dropping the price right down to 5 EUR. That's right. Only 5 EUR.

If you're like me and forgot to buy Christmas presents for about a dozen people, this is your chance for redemption. While you're at it you can pride yourself in the fact that you're supporting a worthy cause.

Remember that the calendar doubles as a set of 12 postcards. So at the new rate of 5 EUR, that's about 40 cents per postcard. It's so cheap you really ought to send us one of those postcards just to thank us

Anyway, go here to buy a couple.

I found out yesterday about microformats, a standard set up to enable easy sharing of content from websites.

One of the main examples is their hCard format. Many of you might already be familiar with vCards, a format used to share your contact information with other people. Apple's Address Book will open the file and automatically add a contact. hCard takes this a step further and allows users to 'Save a contact' when viewing their profile on a website. Depending on what information is provided, this could include their name, phone number, website, location you name it.. In our case, we have some of that information available for many of our users. Considering the implementation of hCard implementation is quite simple, I went ahead and added it to all Travellerspoint member profiles.

Firefox 3 is expected to have microformat support embedded, but till then you can install this FF 2 Add On that will do the trick nicely.

After installing that Add On, navigate to a Travellerspont member's profile, for instance mine. You will see the 'hCard' icon in your toolbar light up to indicate that it has found some contact information. Clicking on that will give you some options of things to do with the data.

This is not a change that will immediately seem useful to many of you, but I'm convinced that over the next year or so it is going to become a standard way of gathering contact information.