Welcome to the TravelPod forums

[ianr]

Hi Guys.

I've been using the site for a few weeks now, and just thought I'd draw attention to some of the issues I'm having with it. None of it's particularly major, and a lot of it may well be just newbie misunderstanding.

Don't get the wrong idea here - in general I think the site does the job very well. That this post spends more time talking about (possible) negatives than it does talking about the positives reflects the nature of a feedback post - not my overall opinion of the site!

Also, although I've spent some time searching the forums for these points having been raised in the past, I wouldn't say my search has been exhaustive. If I am raising issues that have been done to death in the past, then I apologise.

Here goes:

1. When I edit my profile(/"Personal Settings"), if certain fields already contained a double-quote character, the entries loaded into the edit boxes on the edit page are truncated at the first double-quote. Unless these entries are repaired through the edit page, the truncated entries are committed when the edit page is 'Applied'. I've seen this happen to 'favourite quote' (ironically) and 'friends would describe you as'. ('Amazing moment' works fine though.) I'm guessing this behaviour isn't 'by design'.

2. Any chance of getting a spell checker that knows more languages than just American English? (British English would be nice, IMO!) Or is this a config option that I just haven't found?

3. If I'm understanding things correctly, I'm only allowed to add links to travel-related websites to the list that appears at the bottom of my profile page. If this is the case, wouldn't it be worth making this clear to guests? (Perhaps by changing the section title to, "Fred's Favourite Travel-Related Websites".) A couple of people have already asked my why I've not listed non-travel related sites which they know me to use frequently. (In fact, I don't really see why only travel-related links are allowed if the purpose of the page is to give guests an insight into who the member is. But I guess that this issue has been debated in the past.)

4. In an attempt to encourage feedback from guests, have you considered adding polling to blog entries? I'm a little dismayed at how few of my guests have posted comments on my entries, and have got to thinking that I might get more feedback if they had simple, anonymous, multiple-choice ways of giving it. I'd imagine that most polls would be along the lines of "Do you think I did the right thing?" or "Which of these places do you think I should go to next?" Probably not easy to do, but arguably an extension of the 'embedded picture tag' concept.

5. This may be controvertial, and relate to concepts so fundamental to the site that it wouldn't be possible to do anything about it even if you agreed in principle. However, it strikes me that you're using the single concept of an 'entry' to achieve two different things. As a traveller, essentially I want your site to provide functionality for recording the following distinct and independent things:
a. A record of my journey route. Essentially this is a list of "Place + ArrivalDateAndTime + DepartureDateAndTime" records.
b. Timestamped commentaries that I choose to make with arbitrary regularity.
That your site requires me to use the 'entry' concept for both of these results in the clunkiness that comes from needlessly having to associate a map-point with every commentary. (In fact, to avoid specifying multiple map-pins for the same place, I'm tending to use only a single entry for each place, meaning that the blog doesn't record an ArrivalDateAndTime for the place given that I'm seeing the commentry timestamp as being more important.) Okay, so perhaps this isn't such a big deal in the scheme of things. But I thought I'd mention it anyway!

Overall though, keep up the good work!

(And sorry that the post is so long!)

Ian.

[rbisset]

I didn't realise until about 2 months into my trip that there was a spell check function. However I soon found it was pretty useless as I don't write in American English so had to keep ignoring correct UK Spellings (ie Proper English ) all the time.

I don't know why there is a time stamp really. I never once changed the time in any of my entries. Don't really understand what your point 5 is all about though.

[lucky]

Thanks for the feedback... we'll fix that bug and see what we can do on your other points.

[stevejames]

Ian, we don't get the wrong idea at all - your feedback is very much appreciated. One of the great strengths of Travelpod is how it listens to feedback from its users. If an idea receives enough support across the board, or is particularly inventive, you'll find it is implemented somewhere down the line.

Keep the ideas coming!

[henrik.caesar]

I have another feedback now when it's up. I'm trying to delete some of my pictures and upload them again together with a bunch of new ones (probably not the smartest way but I can't be bothered renaming the old ones so all of them are in the right order). The problem is that it is hard work to delete several pictures! Why not add a checkbox in the photo album (the one you edit in your travelogue, not the one people see) so you can delete several in one go?

I do understand you don't want people to delete photos, but sometimes it's necessary

Henrik

[findingnine]

I think I understand Ian's point 5. It is somewhat bothersome, esp at times of slow connection to go throught the map pin process, when the location has not changed. It would be better if changing the pin were an easy option, but defaulting to same location were a quick option too.
Maybe if when the map pin window pops up, it could just ask 'change map pin?' before forcing the process.

[ianr]

Okay. Some (verbose) clarification of what I'm getting at with point 5 for those who are interested.
(All caveats from the original post apply. Including the 'length' apology.)

Imagine this.

When you log in and select the travelogue which you wish to update, you get not only the current "add/modify/delete entry" options, but also a "modify route" option. When you select said "modify route" option, you're presented with a page that lists the places which you've been to (or plan on going to) during the journey, together with an arrival and departure timestamp for each. And each listed place has an associated map-pin.

For example, for my current trip, when I selected "modify route", I'd see something like the following (except nicely formatted, or course!).

Place___________________________Arrival_________Departure

London Heathrow_______________________________17/04/07 20:00___[Map Pin]
Delhi__________________________18/04/07 10:00__18/04/07 15:00___[Map Pin]
Agra__________________________18/04/07 18:00__21/04/07 10:00___[Map Pin]
Delhi__________________________21/04/07 13:00__22/04/07 08:00___[Map Pin]
Kovalam_______________________22/04/07 15:00__27/04/07 14:00___[Map Pin]
Trivandrum_____________________27/04/07_______28/04/07 15:00___[Map Pin]
Varkala________________________28/04/07 17:00__03/05/07 10:00___[Map Pin]
...
Palolem________________________20/04/07 15:00__22/05/07_________[Map Pin]
Benaulim_______________________22/05/07_______24/05/07_________[Map Pin]
Panjim_________________________24/05/07_______25/05/07 11:00___[Map Pin]
Delhi__________________________26/05/07 13:00__27/05/07_________[Map Pin]
Nepal__________________________27/05/07_______06/07___________[Map Pin]
Tibet__________________________06/07__________07/07___________[Map Pin]
Nepal__________________________07/07__________07/07___________[Map Pin]
Various places in northern India____07/07__________08/07___________[Map Pin]
Various places in Rajasthan________08/07___________09/07___________[Map Pin]
Delhi__________________________09/07__________17/09/07 19:00____[Map Pin]
London Heathrow________________17/09/07 23:00

Some of this I'd have set up before I started my trip, on the basis of what I intended my route to be, and the dates of travel tickets that I wanted to not have to change. But much of it would be clarified, to the level of accuracy that I cared about (or that I thought my guests cared about), during the trip. I'd probably choose to update my route the first time I found an internet connection in each new town I visited, to make sure that what had been just a plan was now consistent with what actually happened.

This list would be of interest both to my guests during my journey, and to me in years to come when I look back at the record at what, for me, will probably be a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

Of course, the site would be able to plot all this information on a map, for the benefit of both myself and my guests, with the lines representing future planned travel between places being distinguished from that which had already happened. (The point where the one turned into the other would represent where I am at the current time. This would be really cool (if a little gimmicky) when I was travelling between two places if the map-based display of this information refreshed ocassionally. Guests looking at my travelogue would see the point representing where I was at the time, slowly move along the line joining the place I'd just left, to the place I was heading for. Sure, it'd be purely theoretical, based on best-guess predictions, and invalid assumptions about transport being on time and moving in straight lines. But I think it'd be cool all the same. Sorry - I digress.)

That's what maintaining my "route" would be all about.
When I chose to add a new "Entry", then things would be similar to how they are at the moment, except:
- I wouldn't have to set a location or map-pin for the entry. The site would know where I was when I made the entry by looking at where on my route time-series the timestamp for the new entry sat.
- There wouldn't be the concept of a 'map-pin only' entry. At the moment this concept only exists 'cos there's no other way to capture route information. With route information being maintained expicitly as described above, the concept becomes redundant.

There's probably only one thing that this way of doing things would make possible, that, as far as I can tell, can't be handled at the moment. But a number of niggles ('clunkiness' as I called it before) would go away.

The one thing made possible that I can't see a way to handle at the moment is:
- What happens if I'm writing my blog entry when I'm on route between two places? (I may be doing this off-line, typing into a PDA or laptop, or even writing into a notepad, with the intention of uploading later, or I might have a wireless connection. I've found that 'while travelling' is a prime time for thinking about what I'm going to write about the place I've just been to, and surely this sort of thing is going to become more common as mobile internet connections and associated technology become more ubiquitous.) At the moment I have to assign a specific location to this entry, even though I'd rather capture the fact that the brain-dump happened during the journey. With the scheme described above, that wouldn't be a problem. From the timestamp of the entry the site would know to associated the entry with the journey between the two relevant places.

The niggles that the proposed scheme addresses are as follows:
- As FindingNine points out, if I'm submitting multiple entries from the same place, I really shouldn't have to set a map-pin each time. Sure, defaults can be used to make the process easier, but this is just adding features to overcome issues with the way the system has been modelled.
- If I want to record arrival and departure times in a formal way, then because the only formal timestamp I have is that associated with the current concept of an 'Entry', I need two 'Entries' for each place I visit. If I also want an accurate record of when I authored each entry (as in 'the block of prose'), then I need additional 'Entries'. So if I care about recording this time information (and maybe I'm unusual in that I do), I'm looking at two map-pin only 'Entries' per place visited, in addition to ones relating to anything I may have to say about the place.
- The reason why some of the words 'Entry' are in quotes above, is that the use of 'Entries' for recording information which isn't descriptive text, is inconsistent with what most people understand a blog entry to be. Most people (I submit) would say that a block of text is the one thing essential to the concept of a blog entry. But in TravelPod-world an 'Entry' can be a block of text, or information about the route, or a mixture of the two. So when people new to the site see a list of 'Entries' they sometimes can't understand why they "can't get to the words" for some of them. (I had two emails complaining about this when I first circulated my link following two map-pin only and one narrative 'Entry'.) Sure, options for hiding map-pin only 'Entries' help, but again it's adding functionality to overcome issues with the way the system has been modelled.

There we go.
Again, please don't take this the wrong way.
I'm saying all this 'cos I think the site would be better if it worked that way, but even as it stands it's pretty darn good!

And feel free to print out this post as a cure for insomnia.

Right. Enough of this. I've got a beach to go and lie on!

[lucky]

Ok, I've finally digested this post... thanks for taking the time to write in, we'll take this into consideration as we continue to build out the site.

Cheers!

[lucky]

FYI: We've fixed the double quote bug. Thanks for telling us about it.