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.

This morning I came across an article on Gadling about Charles Veley, a man who is supposedly the world’s most traveled person. He’s been to… wait for it… 630 of 673 distinct places. Those places don’t have to be countries, just places that are ethnically or politically different enough from elsewhere to constitute being a separate place.

In reading about Charles Veley, I discovered that there is an elite club called the “Travelers’ Century Club” that you can only become a member of if you have visited 100 or more of the 317 countries defined by the Travelers’ Century Club. Like Veley, they also define some places as countries even though officially they are not countries, simply because these areas are “removed by parent, either geographically, politically or ethnologically”. Fair enough!

So, I wonder what it takes to have traveled to 100 or more of these countries. I’ve made a list of all the places I’ve visited to that are on their list…

1. Australia
2. Cook Islands
3. Hawaiian Islands
4. New Zealand
5. Mexico
6. United States
7. Argentina
8. Brazil
9. Chile
10. Peru
11. Uruguay
12. Austria
13. Czech Republic
14. Denmark
15. England
16. France
17. Germany
18. Italy
19. Netherlands
20. Norway
21. Poland
22. Slovakia
23. Spain
24. Sweden
25. Switzerland
26. Vatican City
27. Egypt
28. South Africa
29. Swaziland
30. Bangladesh
31. Cambodia
32. Hong Kong
33. Japan
34. Malaysia
35. Singapore
36. Thailand

The grand total is… 36. Ok, a wee way off yet from sending in my application. Damn.

Anyway, I think I’ve found my new life goal… to become a member of the Travelers’ Century Club. I’m sure my parents will be very proud…

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.

Last weekend, Chris, mum, dad and I went to Noosa in Australia for a wee break. 5 days only, not 5 weeks like Camp Europe.

I gotta say – I absolutely love Noosa. It’s the second time I’ve been there and I’d definitely go back for more. The best thing about Noosa, apart from the hot weather, is the sea. The sea water is crystal blue and SO warm! Seriously, I don’t know exactly how warm the water was because I don’t typically carry a themometer around with me, but trust me, if I’m raving about it – it’s gotta be warm. I won’t touch New Zealand waters because well, what’s the point? You’re basically in pain getting in to the water and back out again. It’s more like torture than a nice relaxing swim.

We stayed at Noosa Pacific Riverside Resort – very nice self-contained, fully-furnished and most importantly, AIR CONDITIONED 2~3 bedroom apartments that overlook tennis courts, a swimming pool, a spa and a sauna. There is also a nice gym for your work-out pleasure. Very nice indeed, all for a very reasonable price of $110 AUD per night. The only downside to staying at Noosa Pacific is that it is a 5~10 minute drive (30 minute walk) away from Noosa Heads itself, where the marvelous beach I mentioned above is. Next time I go to Noosa I might try looking for somewhere a little bit closer to the beach itself (without paying thousands of dollars per night that is).

While in Noosa we also walked around the Saturday markets at Eumundi, visited a small town quite high up in the hills called Montville, spent a day at Australia Zoo (saw lots of koalas and kangaroos, cute!), and went shopping at Maroochydore Sunshine Plaza. Wow, so much in only 5 days!!

Anyway, I’ll throw a couple of photos up here to make you all jealous

Sunset at Noosa Heads, Australia

Some iguana lizard thing at Australia Zoo

A little kangaroo at Australia Zoo

Camp Europe – Chris’ and my Christmas holiday last year. 5 weeks of non-stop site-seeing, exotic food savouring, wine-drinking and plenty of train rides all throughout Europe. Oh and a quick stopover in San Francisco as well as Tokyo (OMG Tokyo is the coolest place on earth and I NEED to go spend some more time there).

Camp Europe required a brand new skin on TravelBlog of course, this time something cleaner and fresher look. This time I had the luxury of having Chris on the job, working on the design and implementation of the new design (plenty of CSS) while I fine-tuned some of the back end and got some neat new functionality going (I’ll describe some of this later on).

Anyway, there are some things about the holiday that I feel I need to write about here, just because they’re way too cool not to mention. And it might just inspire a few others out there to go and see these things for themselves…

Pier 39 – San Francisco – USA

First of all, San Francisco is, in fact, as nice as everyone says it is. We even got to chill with some of those Free Hugs people before we’d even reached our hotel!! Although we arrived there just before Christmas (American winter), it was amazingly sunny and warm enough during the day to wear a t-shirt. That’s better than it was back home in NZ, in what is meant to be our summer! Pier 39 was lovely, full of souvenir shops and restaurants. I can only imagine how beautiful it must be to walk around there during the summer months.

Pier 39 – San Francisco, USA

The Top of The World – Jungfraujoch – Switzerland

Chris and I made the best decision ever when we decided to go on a day trip up to The Top of The World – Jungfraujoch whilst in Interlaken, Switzerland. We caught the Jungfraubahn – a train that takes you up 3471m to the top of the Jungfraujoch. Man, what an experience. The train ride itself was awesome, crunching it’s way up some very steep areas and then finally through a really really long thin tunnel close to the top of the mountain. At the top there were a couple of restaurants, a couple of viewing platforms, and best of all, an ice palace!! You can walk through it, slipping and sliding around like unco-ordinated muppets. Hehe I totally recommend this trip for anyone passing through the area.

Jungfraujoch – Switzerland

Brugge – Belgium

Belgium is already very well known for its chocolate, so I won’t go on about that. Instead I’ll talk about Brugge, an incredibly cute little city in the West of Belgium. Apart from the lovely town square that is surrounded by beautifully decorated buildings and a big church with an imposing spier (that is, interestingly, leaning slightly to one side, ala Tower of Pisa), Brugge has a maze of little cobble-stoned roads lined with beautiful little shops, restaurants and cafes. It also has a series of waterways, giving it a venice-style glamour. There is a chocolate factory, a museum where you can see and worship a drop of Jesus’ actual blood (apparently!!) and at Christmas time there is a great European-style market place in the town square selling hot mulled wine (Glühwein), hot chocolates, crepes and waffles smothered with chocolate, hot donuts, and plenty of other savoury foods as well. YUM!! Basically, if you’re looking for a place to chill out for a few days, Brugge is a great choice.

Town Square – Brugge – Belgium

While in San Francisco, Chris and I were lucky enough to spend a few hours visiting “The Goog” offices – aka “Googleplex” – in Mountainview. How cool is that?!?

Our friend Jeremy Ginsberg who is a software engineer at Google invited us to come have lunch with him and gave us a tour of the offices. What can I say – the place is HUGE!! We drove down wide streets beautifully lined with trees and large buildings on either side. Most of them seemed to belong to Google but there were also others pertaining to other techie companies such as Sun Microsystems amongst others. Once inside the “Googleplex”, it looked like we’d stepped into an American-style university campus. A central courtyard filled with brightly colored outdoor furniture filled a space between 5 or so large buildings. Five fully catered cafes serve free full-on buffet-style meals to employees and their guests all day, there are laundry facilities on site so that employees can bring their dirty laundry to work with them (ewww), a juice bar handing out interesting concoctions of blended fresh fruit (I think I had an apple pie fruit smoothie) on demand, a gym with state-of-the-art equipment in it (treadmills with LCD screens in them!?) for employees to use at their leisure and a mini swimming pool with a full-time life guard sitting by. Oh and a life-sized Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton parked outside in the gardens and the actual SpaceShipOne spacecraft (X1) just hanging over the stairs in the foyer. Those are just some of the perks enjoyed by those who work at the Googleplex in Mountainview. Pretty amazing really.

What I found quite interesting, apart from all the above of course, was the layout of the actual desks inside the offices. Software engineers are grouped into decently-sized offices of 3 or 4. Since Google have expanded so much in recent years, they no longer have enough offices to fit all their engineers in, so they’ve built some futuristic-looking tents that are installed in the middle of the buildings and call them offices. Pretty crazy looking.

Anyway, I think I can safely say that both Chris and I were awe-struck at the magnitude of the Google empire, and very jealous of everyone who gets to work there. And thanks Jeremy for your very informative tour of the place!!!