Why don't you just focus on the travel bloggers side to begin with? Specifically, I think there's a need for a Soundcloud-esque embeddable widget that people can put directly in their blogs (naturally linking back to you). THAT provides real value IMO. Most blogs are highly entertaining, but they rarely have mapped content - you can provide that.
From someone that's founded a travel marketplace & failed, avoid network effects in the beginning if at all possible. It's a whole other level of pain, that in your case at least, I don't think is needed.
I'm actually going backpacking for 3 months starting next week, so if you come out with a widget, I'm more than happy to use the beta versions and give you feedback.
Can you explain what you mean by that? I thought network effects were good. No?
They are. But you shouldn't rely on them in the beginning because they won't be there.
In this case, if you get bloggers using your product, logging their trips, etc, you'll slowly build up your content. Once it's comprehensive enough for travellers to get value from it, you'll be able to build network effects from a much stronger position.
Then I found out the search is, bluntly put, absolute crap. I typed in 'Italy': nothing. I typed in 'My Weekend in Italy', the name of the first item: nothing. I typed in 'Argentina' and got 'National Congress of Argentina'.
If you're trying to build a site about going cool places, I'd recommend making it possible for me to FIND those cool places.
[1]: https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=zU8tVyO_sZdE.kj9h...
Overall this looks cool. Also could you add a "Date" field for each destination or at least have and option for a "multi city" trip option.
Thanks!
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This kind of thing would also work on an expat site where people could give their impressions of living in X city. Maybe with categorization of person's general income range, lifestyle and type of experience being shared (so others of similar ilk could look at what they might encounter in that city).
These are two pretty different target audiences though. The formers one caters towards tourists who are about to visit the city for vacation while the latter caters towards people who are considering moving to that city.
I have about 20 cities under my belt (half, foreign) and could do the low-income version of all of them :D But this would be a good thing to add to the one or two expat-related sites concerning living costs that have popped up on HN in recent weeks.
Because of this grouping, I would suggest 'tags' for the trips. For example, someone could tag a Toronto trip with "sports" or "hockey". Their trip might include a trip to the hockey hall of fame, a Leafs game, a trip to the old Maple Leaf Gardens (now a grocery store). These tags could be pre-determined by yourself, or user submitted. This way, if I am going to Paris for example, and I see a trip that is tagged "Music", and I'm not into a music trip, then I know I should look at someone else's trip for Paris. Thinking about this though, perhaps each destination within a trip/country could be tagged since trips often have multiple events with multiple 'tags'. Sorry, I'm just rambling a bit. I think you get the idea though.
I'll be submitting a few reviews though. Good work!
I found a bug: I started at http://itripd.com/trip/4, scrolled down to the Desert Safari, clicked it, then clicked a picture. When you close out of the picture (clicking the X) the site gets into a weird non-functional state. Clicking a second picture removes the list of pictures, but doesn't bring up a new one. I'm on Safari 7.0.5, but this happens in Chrome as well.
The weird thing about this is that other trips don't seem to have that problem. I did notice that other trips load the comments box beside the picture, but this particular one doesn't. Very strange!
2) I am able to traverse your directories eg http://itripd.com/js/
I don't know about apache so was unable to find a web config kinda file
3) I tried some sql injection and got this response "The URI you submitted has disallowed characters."
I assume you are doing this manually rather than using sql parameters?
4) Inline CSS...yuck
5) Links like this http://itripd.com/trip/4 arn't very friendly.
I like to check places to visit,shop,eat,drink based on cities.
Just few suggestions though, 1) It needs proper search feature. 2) Its going to be loaded with lots of blogs probably on same city? So, how would you handle that? For Eg: If I search for say 'Dubai' then if I got more than one results how can I filter this out. 3) It would be nice if I could navigate based on categories on map. Like 'eat','drink','shop' etc
Otherwise, well done! Looks good to me.. :)
1. Mobile interface (I hate to be that guy, but this would be awesome as a native app for those travelers) 2. Widgetized! Most travel bloggers want this on their own site. 3. Ability to map out a journey (as opposed to placing destinations on a map). I think a lot of travelers really take pride in the route they take and how they get from place to place (eg a motorcycle ride down the coast of Vietnam, or a boat ride across the mediterranean, etc)
If I was doing an idea like this, I think I would have gone mobile first (perhaps you're thinking to go that way anyway?) That way you can tap into people's geo location right away, easily associate photos & videos with the location, people can log their thoughts/feelings with a quick note, and perhaps purposely limit it to 140 to make it tweetable.
1) When I type in the city name in the search box, I can hit return to make selection, I have to click on the city in the drop down menu.
2) missing search box on the front page.
3)I type in France, and it says nothing matched my search. I would have expected that Paris would be shown.
4) I like that you are using OpenStreetMap instead of Google's or Microsoft's map products.
Hope it works out for you!
Also, do you specifically disable selecting and copying text? I can't seem to do it in Safari. I found out when I tried to copy that error message, so the direct impact on you is people are dissuaded from sending you error messages!
How to setup a free SSL certificate on apache. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...
Edit to add: Also, please allow setting a username so the profile URL is meaningful (and pretty).
Edit again to remove unnecessary feature request.
It'd be nice if you gave us the ability to zoom in and out of our own free will. I managed to double-click zoom a bunch of times and it took me ages to get back out of a small village on the coast of Italy.
Edit: John, your server is rejecting my reply to your email. Check your settings or contact using a different email.