Show HN: Create a Minimalist Travel Diary | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Create a Minimalist Travel Diary

traveldays.com

29 pointsyunusabd18 comments

Nice simple layout and interface. Can this content be exported in a simple format or would it perpetually live on TravelDays?

Thanks! I think an export function would be nice, did you have a particular format in mind? Is it more about exporting the layout or having access to the raw data?

Raw data could be a good option. A PDF, PPT, or screensaver option would be cool too!

Is this a free service, taking donations or do you plan on charging at some point?

I like that, or maybe an option to create static HTML pages with everything baked in, that you can download. Hopefully with more active users I'll get a clearer picture of what users want and need in that regard.

Regarding monetization, right now my goal is to make this as useful and attractive as possible to people. Down the road I'd really like a donations/pwyw approach. For me travel and generosity go hand in hand, so I think it would be meaningful. Not sure if it would work, but I'd be willing to give it a try.

I agree that some type of download would be nice to have just in case. I don't know what format to use.

Signing up and playing around a bit is on my todo list for the end of the week. A couple questions. Do the locations have any function or are they just for reading? Are the albums shared by default?

Have you considered a way to let a couple people add to a single trip album? I find that coordinating pictures after a trip can be a challenge, from receiving a zipped dump of all pictures to just getting 1 or 2 by text. If I went on a weekend bike trip with 3 friends it would be kind of nice to let them put a few pictures in and have a semi collaborative album. This might be going too far from your goal, but it's been an idea I've been thinking about as I stopped using instagram for sharing trip pictures with friends on those trips.

The locations are also used to show the route on a map. You can actually see it by clicking on a yellow location marker. It's a bit hidden because the UI is still a bit buggy, so until I get it fixed it's more of an easter egg.

The "MVP" for collaborative albums would be sharing an account. At this point you could even create a new account just for the trip, so your friends don't get access to your other photos. I realize it's not ideal, but maybe it's enough to try it out?

The albums are shared insofar as anyone with the link can see them and they get indexed by google. But there is no central feed where albums or photos might appear. Adding password protection and a noindex option on a per-album basis is also on my list.

Aha that is cool. It didn't work earlier because I did not click on the location names with the highlighted map marker.

Don't know why I didn't think to do that, I'll try to convince a friend or two to give it a test.

I can tell you why: Because it has no affordance :) I just keep it hidden in plain sight until I smooth out some of the quirks of the map integration.

Would be great if you could spread the word, thanks!

Enjoyed browsing through this application; I didn't realize how much I wanted to annotate pictures or picture series until I saw your example. Great stuff and I wish this was a feature in Google Photos :)

Right?! My first travel blog was with Wordpress, where I always felt like I had to write a whole article in order to post. Which almost never happened. Then I moved to Facebook, which was OK at first, but then... you know the story. Also, bit rot is real on FB. Then IG, which really doesn't lend itself to posting self-contained albums.

So I really like the idea of having something clean and simple, where you can just upload photos and provide some additional context, and have it look nice.

That's a great website, but it can be better. I can't seem to understand the function of the website until I click the underlined words below. Great app, but you need to improve its user experience.

Thanks for the feedback, appreciate it! It's definitely challenging to strike the right balance between simplicity and discoverability. I was going for a "show, don't tell" approach, I guess more explanations on the main page would have made your experience better?

The main page doesn't show nor tell at the moment. I think any examples could be moved to front and center.

Nice idea. Do you get the location data from the image? Offering a map view showing all of the pins/path in one view would be nice.

I'm doing something similar (low-touch blog/diary tool) with https://textpost.me. One limitation with operating over text only is lack of data that comes through, including user's local time and location. I'd like figure out an easy way to allow for that, which would make it more functional as a travel diary.

Does it fediverse? That would be awesome.

I'm still wrapping my head around the whole Mastodon and Fediverse space, but generally I'm not disinclined. I think it would be mainly a technical challenge. Some googling actually brought me back to HN, to someone in a similar situation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17804081

Very nice!!!

Care to share a bit about the tech stack?

Sure, anything in particular? The frontend uses Nuxt.js, which is great because it brings SSR and PWA support out of the box. It also helps you organize your code a little better. For the backend it's Node and MongoDB and for deployment I use docker compose.

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