Show HN: The most beautiful places on earth | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: The most beautiful places on earth

mostbeautifulplaces.org

85 pointsthlt51 comments

Nice, but you should change the rectangular boxes to rounded corners, the corners look harsh and ugly.

Also, there's a distance underneath the link, but I have no idea what it means nor how to change it.

yeah it's pretty useless, I'll change it to district and country where the place belongs to.

The distances are relative to a blue marker on the map, which you can drag to your current location. For me, it was in the UK and completely hidden by one of the boxes. I just happened to notice it during the refresh after manipulating the map.

kilometers too pls :)

Namely:

  .overlay-label {
    border-radius: 5px;
  }

lol you guys seriously hate hard corners, i don't think there is anything wrong with it.

hmnn indeed looks better. Updated. Thanks.

Hmm. You are only supposed to add pictures for new places. What happens when the first picture added along with a new place is beautiful, but much more beautiful photos exist? Worse yet, what if more representative photos exist?

E.g. arguably Mont Saint-Michel is a good candidate (in a similar vein as Mdina/Malta). I've got a nice, prototypical photo of Mont Saint-Michel, but I'm sure much, much better photos would be added -- the light was only okay, there are people in the photo, my camera back then wasn't the greatest. I've also got an image from within/on top of Mont Saint-Michel, which is also nice, but arguably the photo chosen to represent Mont Saint-Michel should be the classic "long shot" of the entire mountain/city/church.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Saint-Michel

In the spirit of the site itself, maybe a community process could manage existing places. E.g. a regular contest/vote for a better photo or simply a wiki. And of course these are issues that only crop up when and if the site takes off, so they don't need to be solved for the first iteration. Although it does pose a problem even now, since I feel apprehensive about adding any of my images since I don't want to prevent anybody else from adding theirs!

yeah this is in the plan. There should be no limitation in order to get better.

Heh, good thing I didn't add my Mont Saint-Michel photo, since it doesn't remotely compare to the one someone added in the intervening 8 hours: http://mostbeautifulplaces.org/item/5291532

Too bad the images aren't available in a higher res, btw.

I wonder why we don't see more map apps like this.

Just of the top of my head:

Around the world route maps (people submit the trips they did)

Greatest explorers route maps (although I guess there might be some problems with historical accuracy)

Geek Spots Around the world

Known Military Bases around the world (and perhaps a strategy game on top)

The use of large scale maps are IMHO still a very underutilized area because most go for the location based stuff.

I was sure I'd seen the Geek Spots one on HN before, so here, I found it: http://nerdydaytrips.com/

Also though in tracking that down, I found this enormous (2300+!) catalog of Google Maps mashups:

http://www.programmableweb.com/api/google-maps/mashups

Thanks for that mashup link, I'm always on the lookout for web map references so that's pretty useful. Cheers.

Oh wow cool

I just found a place I'd like to visit. I saw "Valley of the Ten Peaks" in Canada. I visited Lake Louise on a road trip, but did not make it up to Moraine Lake. This makes me want to go back.

How will you keep the map from getting too crowded?

We cluster them as how http://cravify.com works.

both are awesome sites. good work!

The social media bar is interfering somehow on chrome 21.0.1157.0 (Developer Build 139621 Windows) (with plugins set to click enable) and 1024*768 screen on xp.

Mainly, all the page under the bar is blank. this affects where the overview map thinks the center is, when you double click to zoom in. also, made the individual site pages uselessly narrow.

edit: deleting this node "<div id="share_btns" class="panel">" makes it usable.

it is different in many terms like mostbeautifulplaces.org focuses on the true beauty of that place, that's it. Also it is crowd-sourced, meaning that any one from all over the world can help discover great places on earth.

How come Christ Church Meadow, Oxford, is also in Venice? See http://mostbeautifulplaces.org/item/5291686 vs http://mostbeautifulplaces.org/item/5291685 ... Hackish indeed... ;-)

ooop how come there was such a mistake hmnnn. The Venice one is replaced by the correct one now.

Looks really cluttered, despite not having a lot up yet. Maybe have the boxes expand when the cursor is near?

I agree. I think a transparent box with just the name would be great, and then when you mouseover/click, it would open a tooltip similar to PadMapper. Right now the distance and thumbnail don't really add much to the initial tooltip.

It would be great if each location had several pictures, and info on how to travel there & other nearby attractions. For instance, maybe it could open a link to HipMunk with the nearest airport already filled in, or it could just tell you airline prices directly. Do that, add a few hundred more locations, and this would actually be a really really cool site.

hi, thanks for the great ideas.

Using safari (5.1.5) on mac, I can't click on any of the place links (works ok in chrome)

hi thanks for the report, I'll investigate the issue soon.

Good stuff!

I just added two new places (Niagara Falls and Yosemite Falls). I'm hoping for this to catch on, that way It can help me plan my US-West_Coast trip in a few months :D

thanks, they are awesome places ;)

You have badlands national park located near Minneapolis MN. I don't know if this was meant to be a joke or not but you're off by several hundred miles.

This is a really cool idea, it would be nice if you worked out a way for the boxes to not overlap though.

Where did you get your initial dataset from?

Hi thanks, we have collected data from different sources for bootstrapping.

Reminds me a bit of http://www.where-is-this.com/. Also a collection of very nice places.

You should make sure that the photos pass some sort of test for quality and resolution. I want to see photos that make stuff look truly beautiful.

yeah we manually review them all.

Using content from Wikipedia without kind of attribution is not cool and not legal. All the descriptions seem to be verbatim copies. Boo!

Yeah all the content is from Wikipedia. Some very first places were not attributed properly, the newest ones are. We'll fix them soon. Thanks for the feedback.

So needed. Thanks.

Brutal on mobile.

yup not mobile friendly yet :)

I'm on an iPad and I can't make any of the links work.

I want to share this on twitter and attribute it properly, but you don't share your twitter handle anywhere on the site, or in your HN profile ...

Why don't people mention who they are when they make something awesome?

hey the site is made by @cravify :)

Speaking generally, surely having a link to the site is attribution?

It's not the same. Attaching a person to the link is a much "warmer" referral/introduction/what-you-want-to-call-it than just linking to a site.

You're assuming they have a Twitter account.

What makes a place beautiful? Is it the location or the scenery? If it is the former than your website design should is spot on. If the latter than you should get rid of the map as the helm and show users a beautiful grid of images with location info at the bottom.

I bet both location and scenery are important as you'll consider where to visit first. Wouldn't it great to know somewhere is very beautiful and just close to you ? It is also very helpful when you travel as you don't want to miss any beautiful places near your destinations.

It would indeed be a tragedy if Fukushima reactor 4 collapses. http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/06/01/fukushima-nuclea...

It already is a tragedy.

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