By this Author: Sam I Am

Every woman's worst nightmare; on a photo with the entire TP gang.... (from left to right - Dmitry, Sam, Bec, Eric and Peter). Sorry Rebecca for saddling you up with this photo

Yesterday was a big day for Eric. Not only did we let him out of the Travellerspoint dungeon for a whole day , he also took the opportunity of being out to get married!
Congratulations Eric and of course Rebecca (no, we don't know how he managed to find a good looking girl like that crazy enough to marry him either LOL)

Earlier today an advertiser was pointing at some stats in Alexa as a basis for advertising on a Tupela site. Now while I understand the need to try and get some idea of how popular a site is before putting advertising money in it, it really cracked me up because Alexa is known to be seriously flawed (plus, they didn't bother asking me if there was any validity to the stats or not).

This was illustrated even more when I was checking out some new features Alexa is now showing in its ranking of Travellerspoint:

1. the breakdown per country of where most users are coming from (here's a screenshot for TP)

and

2. the real cracker, where Travellerspoint ranks in each country in terms of popularity!

Yes folks, that's correct. In Norway, Travellerspoint is the 227th site in terms of popularity and even more impressive, in Australia only 298 sites are more popular than Travellerspoint!! Now I wonder, could that possibly have anything to do with the location of Travellerspoint staff???

Of course the numbers are fun to watch and do provide a broad sense of popularity, but it's important to realize how easily these are influenced by a few people who visit a site a lot! Now if only we could attract some more traffic from the States; perhaps we should set up an office there too?!

Some people must have too much time on their hands!! Great video

Ahila came up with the idea recently to allow members to send other members online postcards (aka e-cards) using just their usernames, instead of the existing system where a name and email address is needed.

The idea proved too good for us to resist and has now been implemented.

Here's a quick overview of how this works.

First, you select the photo you want to send. You can send any photo on Travellerspoint as a postcard, and with (currently) 80000+ photos uploaded, you should have plenty of choice If you'd like to just look at some of the featured photos, check out the featured galleries per country on the photography or the postcards pages.

I'm going to select one I've uploaded to my own gallery:

On the postcard creation page, you select 'Travellerspoint Username', like so:

The form will change (provided your browser supports this which 99% should!) and you will see the name/email boxes replaced with a single box where you enter the username (type or copy/paste it).

Naturally, you should be careful you type the correct username (!), because if you type a username that exists, but isn't the one you intended, you will have a mistified recipient on the other end

Hit the preview button and see if you like the look of your postcard:

I do, so I hit the 'Send Card' button and voila, the member I have selected will now receive an email (yes, this goes via email, not the PM system!) notifying them of the postcard waiting for them on Travellerspoint. You can also choose to edit the card at this stage which will take you back to the last page.

Hope you enjoy!