By this Author: Sam I Am

Going travelling and want to let everyone know where to find your blog/diary/photos et al?!

Enter Travel Cards, the latest TP feature to be included under that all encompassing personal login area we call 'My Control Panel' (yes, you have to be logged in to view these areas).

Travel Cards is a simple concept aimed at those of you that want to let others know how they can keep in touch with you, while you are travelling. They work just like business cards, except contain information that is relevant to your travels like your blog domain or where someone could find your personal photo gallery. You could hand these out before you leave to your friends and family - or anyone else that otherwise might forget about you - or after meeting people on your trip that you'd like to keep in touch with.

The system works the same as the personal Luggage Tags you can create on Travellerspoint, in that you generate a PDF with all the information you want to include embedded on a background image.

So, when you visit your Travel Cards area, you will find a form with different default fields that you can include. Think things like name, email address, phone number, blog domain, photo gallery etc. Some of these will be pre-filled in if we have the information available, but you can of course change them if you prefer to use other details. This is a screenshot of how it would look:

You then choose whatever you want to include by ticking the little checkbox in front of that text field:

Now, select a background color:

And hit the Create button. Your computer will notify you a PDF has been created and ask you if you want to save it or preview it. You could then print this yourself on some kind of thickish paper or of course have it printed at one of the many business card print shops around. The printing is one side only so you can write notes on the back.

Oh, and for those of you that this doesn't work for or who want something different, you can also just download a blank background and print these and write on them... not as cool, but hey

Hope you enjoy the feature, it's down at the bottom of your Control Panel if you're wondering. Of course you can also use the 'Promote' feature just to send the different links to your photo gallery and profile/blog etc. to friends and family as well, if you don't feel like printing them.

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!

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;

When it rains, it pours!

After Eric's post on my interview at Folksonomy, there's another interview that's hit the trogosphere (hey, who says I can't make up that word?!). Darren Cronian of Travel Rants is the unlucky chap that had the dubious honour of interviewing me this time.

It's nice and short, so don't worry, you can read the whole thing here and not get bored!

So, some of you might know we TP-ers have a bit of a love for the mac and all things Apple. It must come from that love of seeing computers work how they should and be as intuitive and easy to use as they should. So, although this post is totally unrelated to travel, it is totally related to Apple. In particular, Apple's newest creation, the absolutely stunning iPhone!

Revealed a few hours ago, this thing just makes me drool. A few things make it stand out for me in that 'Apple' way.

• tilt function (yes, all phones can be tilted, but how many actually adjust the screen format from landscape to portrait and vice versa based on the tilt angle?!)
  
• integration with google maps & google earth. It looks great in the demo - hopefully it will live too.
  
• the touch screen and the scroll effects when using it
  
• the way to scroll through album artwork a la itunes (check it out there if you've never seen this before!)
  
• zooming function, using either a pinch type movement with the fingers or double tap
  
• last, but certainly not least for any web developer out there, the way the browser looks. Things like the tilt function come back here, actually making mobile web browsing look good in landscape mode for example. Or zoom in using the same pinch/double tap technique in case you can't read something.
  

Of course it's got a great big screen, doubles as an ipod, has great email/sms and calling extras too.

The downside. Two that I can see on the face of it:
1. storage: 4gb or 8gb could run out pretty quickly if you try and sync all your photos across.
2. availability: even in the US it's not available until June at the earliest. I'm not sure what that means for us non US folk, all 5 billion of us, but I doubt we'll be seeing this thing in stores for a while. Not only that, but a real downside in the States is that you can only use it with Cingular. I hope Apple don't pursue a similar policy in Norway!

Now, I just have to wait a while, or maybe I can pick one up in the States and just plug in my Norwegian sim card....