Code Frenzy

About a week ago, Chris and I “launched” TravelStash.  By “launched” I mean we have now opened it up for general consumption.  Anyone can join TravelStash and use it just like Rheanna and Sanjay did on their recent South Africa trip, Margaret and Alan have on their trip around the South Island of New Zealand and of course, how Chris and I have consistently used it to keep our friends and family updated on all our travels over the past couple of years.

TravelStash started off a few years ago as a simple travel blog with a map on it.  At that time there were no blogging engines available that allowed one to map their travels, something I was very interested in since I was working for a mapping company at the time.  So, I decided to build one from scratch.  I won’t deny it, it’s been hard work, but since then, we’ve built a lot of cool features (read: we’ve spent and continue to spend a lot of time on it!) and TravelStash has grown into a fully functional travel blog (still with a map!).  What makes TravelStash a little different to other travel blogging sites out there is that it allows members to sign up as part of a ‘group’ and create separate ‘trips’ for each of their holidays that they can then ‘blog’ under.  Members can upload as many photos as they like to each of their blog posts using a really advanced photo upload mechanism designed to facilitate photo management as much as possible.  Aside from their travel stories, members can use TravelStash as a bookmarking tool to save links or travel ideas, something that we have chosen to call a ‘wishlist’.  You can even save your wishlist to a PDF file so you can quickly and easily print your bookmarked ideas to paper and take them with you on your next adventure.  Then there are ‘travel tips’ – quick little snippets of travel advice that members can write up…

Basically, there’s a lot of neat stuff already built into TravelStash and we are constantly thinking of new enhancements for it.  The latest addition has been the ability to notify your facebook account (if you have one) when you publish an article or a wishlist item in TravelStash.  That way, if for some strange reason your friends and family haven’t subscribed to your TravelStash RSS feed and aren’t obsessively hitting your TravelStash group or trip pages to see what you’re up to, you can still let them know by posting a small note to your facebook wall and your friend’s news feeds when you publish a new travel post or wishlist item.  We’ll soon be extending this to travel tips too, just to be consistent.

Another feature we’ll be releasing soon is the ability to save an entire trip (photos, map, blog posts and comments) to MS Word or PDF format.  This will enable you to save your holiday stories and memories in a format which you can then print out and make a book out of.  If you save it to MS Word you then have the ability to edit and alter the way it all looks and could even take it down to a print shop to have professionally printed and bound into a beautiful coffee table book.

In any case, at this stage TravelStash is 100% free to use and has no ads.  We think it’s pretty cool (ok, that’s a bit of an understatement… we think it’s freakin’ AWESOME!) and encourage everyone to create an account and use it on their next holiday.

As some of you may by now know, Chris and I have written a website called ‘TravelStash’. It’s essentially a blogging site intended for travelers. It integrates things normally associated with blogging (i.e. writing blog posts, uploading photos, comments) with a map. The structure behind TravelStash is a bit complex but it does make sense. Basically when you join up, you get your own membership. Once you’re a member, you can create a group for yourself and invite others to join your group. Each member can belong to many groups. Someone in the group creates a trip and then all the members of that group are able to log in and post an article about that trip.

We used TravelStash for our ‘Camp Europe’ holiday and more recently for our ‘Exploring the East’ holiday (even though we haven’t quite finished blogging about that one yet… lazy!). Although we’ve almost finished writing all the code necessary to allow others to join, create their own groups, blog about their trips and upload photos from their holidays, we haven’t quite opened it up to the general public. We’re hoping to do that real soon though so keep posted on that one

In the mean time however, I thought I might add a couple of new features to TravelStash. First is the ability to view an entire group’s photos. Until now, photos were only shown on the article with which they were associated. I figured it might be nice to view all of a group’s photos on one page rather than having to individually click on all the articles to see all their photos. You can see an example of that here. Neat eh?

The other feature I added only last night were ‘Travel Tips’. I had lunch with a good friend the other day who told me that it would be neat if we had travel tips posted on TravelStash. He’s right, Chris and I had thought of doing that anyway so I figured I might as well get onto it and just do it. So a few code changes later and we’ve got ‘Travel Tips’ on TravelStash! As you can see, not many travel tips just yet but I’ll make sure to add some more and hopefully when we open TravelStash up to the general public and people flock to it, they’ll add their amazing travel tips too. I was thinking it might be cool to allow comments on travel tips too in case others have something to say about it. Ahh, so many ideas.

Anyway, that’s about it for new features on TravelStash. Chris and I have heaps of ideas for new features, however, so with a bit of luck there may be some cool new stuff on there soon. And obviously we’re really excited about ‘launching’ it to the general public. I’m sure we’ll both learn lots from that experience.