Dec 2006

Just polished off a new way for Travellerspoint'ers to browse through blog entries. It's actually quite interesting seeing how people have categorised their entries and which topics are the main ones in use.

Not much else to say, but check it out!

Browse Travel Blog Entries

Originally when we added the photography XML feeds to our gallery, one of the main reasons was that iPhoto (the built-in Apple photo program) had recently released a new version that included a feature dubbed 'Photocasts'.

This feature encourages you to publish your iPhoto library to a .mac account and then get your family and friends to subscribe to your photo gallery.

Naturally we saw some potential in that and liked the idea of subscribing to friends' Travellerspoint galleries in iPhoto.

Unfortunately though, iPhoto's implementation proved to be problematic. In fact, the program seemed to crash everytime a feed was added. The feeds were still launched and work just fine in many feed readers, however they never worked properly in iPhoto.

Until now.

After some sleuthing, it turns out the thing iPhoto was having problems with was the space in some of the filenames. This is so common in filenames that it was crashing for almost all the feeds. Once that was figured out it was a cinch to fix.

So, now you can subscribe to any Travellerspoint gallery using iPhoto (if you're a Mac user that is ).

Here's how:

1. Find the gallery you want to subscribe to. For instance, I might browse to Sam's gallery of Malia photos. Not that I don't care about the rest of the stuff going on in Sam's life, but let's face it, Malia is most interesting

2. Click on the Subscribe link to the left of the gallery.

3. Look for the URL pointing to the feed. This is found next to the Atom 1.0 link. Copy that link (not the brackets though).

4. Open iPhoto, click on 'Subscribe to Photocast' under the 'File' menu.

5. Hit the Subscribe button in the following dialog

And voila.. you will start seeing the photos come in!

You can now view the Travellerspoint 'Photocast' that you have subscribed to at any time by clicking on it in the left hand navigation of iPhoto.

Update: in an effort to move all our How To guides into one spot, and manage changes to them better, we have moved this content to our wiki. Go to 'How To Insert a Zoomed-In Map in your Travel Blog'.

Example of the end result:

From this view a reader can still choose to zoom out, or pan to other parts of the world map if they like, and naturally they can click on one of the stops or photo locations on the trip to be redirected to your travel map page. The zoomed in view they see in your blog will even automatically be shown to them on the travel map page. Go ahead, try clicking on one of the green dots (photos) or on the dot placed at Avarua (trip stop), and view this in action.

All of us here at Travellerspoint want to wish you a wonderful Christmas! And just because we love you so much, we're launching a bundle of new features for you to enjoy amidst all the festivities...

As of today, you can insert videos into your blog entries! Record your own Christmas greetings for your loyal readers and insert it in the same way you would add a photo. You can also customise the parameters of your travel map, allowing you to change its borders according to where you have travelled. And just in case that wasn't enough, we've added a little tool to the travel maps to calculate how far you have travelled.

So, there's a few little tools for you to play around with over these holidays! Wishing you a very merry Christmas and safe travels!

By special request, here are some photos of the new Travellerspoint office.

The sign doesn't come out well on this photo, but it sure looks good in real life

Our kitchen/lunch/meeting area. Note the hand made kitchen bench on the right and the shelf above it. All recycled wood and second hand furniture of course....

Looking back from the kitchen to the work area with Eric and Dmitry hard at work (or is that YouTube I see there Eric???). As you can see, we like a nice open space....

You're all more than welcome to visit anytime you're in Melbourne. Just drop us a message before coming by to make sure one of us is in!

Cheers, Sam