TravelPod News

For most people, setting out on a cross-India tour in a “tuk tuk” would not be tops on their list of things to do while on a vacation.

Joanna Penny however, is a different sort of person. After climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, she decided to team up with her friend Sharon Jefferies and race across the Indian sub-continent in a small, golf cart-like vehicle.

“I was looking for something adventurous because I’ve never been the sort to just go on a package holiday,” Penny says.

The race is dubbed the Rickshaw Run, and it involves groups of people taking off from Kathmandu, Nepal and ending up (hopefully) in Pondicherry, India.

“It’s completely crazy,” Penny says, “we don’t have any checkpoints at all.”

Most teams are doing the race to raise money for charity. Penny and Jefferies are no exception. The money they raise will help support Mercy Corps, an organization that provides literacy and agriculture training to people who need it. They’ll also be donating money to FRANK Water, another charity that helps bring fresh drinking water to people in India.

Penny is quite the avid traveler, and has already visited 17 per cent of the Earth’s surface, according to her travel map. She says she caught the travel bug in 1995, during her backpacking trip to Canada.

“I sort of realized that, as lovely as Scotland is, there’s a big world out there,” she says, “and I want to experience as much of it as I can.”

Penny and Jefferies leave for Nepal on May 23 and the race to Pondicherry starts June 1. To donate money or read about their trip preparations, head to Penny’s travel blog.

The “Loony Lassis” promise to write blog entries during the race, but Penny acknowledges that this could be difficult because of time constraints.

“I don’t think I’m ambitious enough to get to the podium, but I do want to get to the finish,” she says with a laugh.

You can follow their progress on their aforementioned blog, “The Craziest Idea Yet?!”

(TravelPod is a proud sponsor of The Loony Lassis as they make their trek across India)

The term “RSS feed” looks scary, and very technical, it really is not.
If you can use email, you can use an RSS feed! Here is a conversation between Reluctant RSS Feed User and Enthusiastic Convert:

(If you still have questions after reading this primer, mosey on over to the TravelPod forums and ask me anything!)

Reluctant User: I’ve been hearing a lot about these new-fangled doohickies, RSS feeds. What in tarnation is an RSS feed for?

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Enthusiastic Convert: RSS feeds are for reading blogs, news and frequently updated websites, such as www.travelpod.com

R: Why do I need RSS feeds if I can just visit each website individually? I have all the websites bookmarked in my browser already, it’s easy!

E: Because it’s faster and even easier than bookmarks! An RSS feed reader collects all of your favourite blogs and websites into one place, and with a single glance, you can tell which ones have been updated in the past day, week, month or whenever. The format is very similar to an email browser such as Thunderbird or Outlook. On TravelPod, every blogger has an RSS feed, even if they haven’t started their blog yet. By adding your RSS feed, your friends can stay updated on your travels without getting a bazillion emails every time you leave town.

R: OK, sounds interesting, how do I get started?

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E: Good! My favourite RSS feed browser (and the most popular one on the web) is FeedDemon, you can find it at this website. Download the software, and sign up for an account. Then you can start transferring your “oh-so-2005″ bookmarks to your RSS feed browser.

R: Wait! Not so fast, how do I know if my favourite sites even have RSS feeds?!

E: Calm down, you can subscribe to any site that has a logo that looks like this: Usually, you can just click on the little orange logo, and it will auto-magically open FeedDemon. Then, you’re only a few clicks away from subscribing to updates. As I said before, every blog on TravelPod has its own RSS feed. Try adding some of our most popular blogs to FeedDemon by clicking on this orange logo next time you are reading one of them.

R: OK, I checked, and my favourite non-TravelPod site doesn’t have an RSS Feed! Arg!

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E: I hate to break it to you, but if your favourite site doesn’t have an RSS feed yet, it’s probably not a website you should get your daily news from. Chances are, the site is out of date, and it isn’t updated very regularly.

R: But I know this site is updated all the time!

E: If you know for a fact that the site is updated regularly, you should contact the administrators and ask them if they have an RSS feed. Perhaps they will create one after you ask for it. Chances are, you aren’t the first person to ask.

R: Thank you Enthusiastic Convert, for liberating me from the confines of web browser bookmarks!

E: You are more than welcome, no-longer-reluctant RSS Feed User!

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(Cue big cheesy smiles, bear hug, freeze frame and cheap synth music. End scene.)

You’re not the only one who doesn’t understand RSS feeds, visit our forums to ask questions and find out how to use them!

Are you ready to subscribe to some blogs? Why not add my blog to your feed reader? Or browse some of our popular blogs and add them. After you’ve found one that you like, click on the orange logo and get yourself updated!

Louise Brown

TravelPod Community Manager

Another day another new feature on TravelPod! Okay we’re not that quick but we are rolling out a new feature today. The number one request amongst travel-podders at our last meet-up was to be able to tag their entries and photos with places they’ve stayed. So starting today we’ve added a new control that allows you to conveniently tag your entries and photos with places you’ve stayed. We have a pretty large database of existing hotels, hostels, and B&B’s to make it even easier for you to tag your entry. Below is a screenshot of what you will now see when you create or edit an entry.

To use this tagging feature, simply click in the textbox and start typing the name of the place you stayed. An auto-suggest feature similar to the one for cities will appear under the textbox with a list of places that match what you’ve typed so far. Select one of the options or feel free to enter your own name. You can also add more than one place, to do this simply click the “Add another” icon or text. This will take your current selection and move it down into a new textbox leaving the top one free to enter another place.

There is also a search feature, which allows you another way to find hotels, hostels or B&B’s. After entering your query and hitting “Search”, a list of hotels matching your query will be shown. Simply click the name of the hotel and the search window will disappear and the textbox on the entry page will be automatically filled out for you.

Let us know what you think!

Cheers,
Shaun McQuaker
The TravelPod Team

Another long requested featured was just pushed out. We’ve just released a new feature that now allows search results for blogs to be sorted by date or quality so that you can track the latest blogs, photos and videos for a specific destination. 

Here are a few example pages where you can test it out ( look for the new “Sort by” option )

• Canada Blogs
• Keyword search

Cheers,

Shaun

We’ve launched a new way for TravelPod members to share their blogs, photos, and travel maps with their Bebo friends.

If you’re a member of both TravelPod and Bebo you can add “My Travel Blogs” to your Bebo profile. A TravelPod “patch” will then show up on your page under the “My Travel Blogs” section, which will include your travelmap map displaying the places you’ve traveled and links to your TravelPod blogs and photos. Your friends will be able to see these details too.

It’s easy to get started:

1. Go to My Travel Blogs on Bebo
2. Click the “Add this App” button
3. Enter your TravelPod User Id and Password

There is another, more experimental, feature for Bebo. When you send an entry to friends, there is now an option to pick “Bebo” as one of the recipients and we will try to notify your friends on the Bebo Ch-Ch-Changes box. These features are new on Bebo, so we all may have some growing pains.

Happy Traveling,

Clayton

Time for some new changes to old menus.

Changes released today include updated menus on the “Your Travel Blogs“
page and the “Travel Blog Entries” page that shows the entries for a travel blog.

Your Travel Blogs
On this page we’ve added actions for:

• View your travel blog ( it used to be called “view as guest”)
• View your Guest Book

All of the old options are still there just with a different look.

Travel Blog Entries
On this page we’ve added actions for:

• View Entry ( it used to be called “view as guest”)
• View your Comments

We hope you like the changes, we like the infusion of a bit more colour and consistency to the site.

There are other small changes that are occurring throughout the site that you may notice. These are designed to help, rather than hinder so if you have an issue our eyes and ears are always open on the Support and Feedback email addresses.

You’ve asked for this for a while. When you view your blogs in printable form ( ie: by clicking the “print entry” button on an entry ), photo thumbnails are now included by default.

 This lets you print a hard copy of your blogs that includes the photos.

 Here is one of my blogs:

http://www.travelpod.com/print-travel-blog/lucky/sam-2006/tpod.html

You can still disable this by clicking “Hide photos”

 Cheers!

Last week was a little nuttier that usual at TPHQ. The Traveler IQ Challenge was featured on Reddit.com and we doubled in traffic almost instantly which had us scrambling to tweak and optimize the challenge while we ordered new servers.

We also scrambled to be one of the first to launch on Friendster’s new platform. We’re happy to say that you can now play the traveler IQ challenge on Friendster if that’s your social network of choice.

We’ve also hired 2 awesome developers and are this close to hiring a new community manager that you’ll all be meeting soon.

It’s always tough finding time for training but last week we spent 2 days on a course for design and usability - ie: how to make web sites prettier ( is that a word? ) and easier to use. We hear you loud and clear that TP can be a little confusing to use at times and are working hard to make it easier.

We’ve already added a handful of tweaks to make it easier to use and plan to roll out more updates this coming week. Making TP easier to use is very high on our priority list so you will most likely start noticing small changed here and there.

We’ve been growing the team a lot faster than we’d thought we would this year and although we just moved into our new office a few months ago, we’re looking for a new office already!

We’ll make sure to post some pics once we find something and settle in.

On a personal note, we’re looking forward to another TravelPodder joining the extended team: I just found out that I’m going to be the father of a baby boy soon! Which probably means that I’ll have to master the art of changing diapers while posting to this blog on Sunday mornings

Cheers!

I thought I would post about some smaller enhancements we made to TP this week while I drink my Saturday morning coffee…

We’ve been a little distracted by interviews this week ( BTW, we’re hiring Developers if you’re interested ) so nothing earth shattering but we did add a few things:

- We added some usability enhancements like autoselect on our homepage and login page. Now you can just start typing your search query or your login name without having to select the field ( one less step ).

- We added the “Latest Forum Post” section to the homepage to show the last post to our forums.

- We also fixed a nagging bug that some members wrote in about when having problems posting comments.

- We added a new header for this blog that you’re reading now.

… and a couple other small things not worth mentioning.

Like I said, nothing earth shattering but we’re always improving the site and try our best to keep you up to date.

We’ve got bigger things in the works, stay tuned.

Enjoy the weekend! 

Due to popular demand we have brought back the “Photo Teaser” that show thumbnails at the top of your entry when you’ve weaved entries into your entries. This will now show up if you have added photos into your entry text yourself.

Just a reminder that if you have a large number of entries and need help disabling “Automatic Photo Weaving” just contact support and we’ll take care of you.

Happy Travels,
Clayton

The new TravelPod homepage was launched today. It’s a long awaited overhaul and greatly simplifies ease of use (hopefully) … and it’s pretty. Let me know what you think by responding to this blog post or emailing me.

Cheers,
Shaun

Technically I’ve been writting our “TravelPod Blog” for years. It used to be called “Lucky’s News” … and calling this a blog is confusing seeing as we’re a travel blogging site SOoooo…

 To keep it simple, we’ve moved our company blog to WordPress and are calling it “TravelPod News” … partly because more people are going to be contributing to the blog than just me now.

 The whole team will be pitching in to keep things interesting. Our original “Lucky’s News”  is still available here.

Welcome to our new TravelPod News Blog from the TravelPod Team!

The TravelPod Team

(Left to right: Clayton, Carmella, Rod, Luc, Shaun )