Two new themes

In the past week two new themes have been added for you to choose from. Enjoy!

Videos in your travel blog!

I’m happy to announce that from now on you can publish videos on your Fuzzy Travel blog! We’ve partnered up with VideoEgg, who will take care of the uploads, storage and display of all your travel movies.

To upload videos in the Member Area, you’ll first need to download & install VideoEgg’s Publisher — a browser plugin that converts and compresses your video on your local computer. Thanks to that process, uploading times should not be more than a few minutes (depending on the length of your video and your internet connection speed of course). The Publisher accepts several sources of video: files, camcorders, webcams and even mobile phones. It also allows you to edit your movie before you upload it: you can erase portions, and change the video’s start & end points.

Because I realize that not every Fuzzy Travel member will want to make use of the video functionality, the ‘Videos’ menu item will only be displayed in your blog when you’ve actually uploaded one or more travel videos.

A live example of an uploaded travel movie can be found here: Video of Tasmanian Devils. And here’s a screenshot of the video uploading page in the Member Area.

Comments, feedback, and your video publishing experiences are more than welcome!

Adding links

In the past week I received feature requests from two members because they wanted to be able to add links to other blogs and websites in a ‘links section’ on their travel blogs. Well, good news for them, and for the rest of all Fuzzy Travel members: you can now add links to all your favorite websites.

The links will be displayed in the sidebar of your travel journal — with a maximum of five to avoid cluttering of the interface. If you add more than five links, your sidebar will also display the option to click through to your Links Page — a page in your travelogue where all of your links are listed.

Adding and managing links can be done from within the Member Area.

Poll: Want video?

A question to all Fuzzy Travel members: Would you like to be able to upload and publish videos in your travelogue? VideoEgg can be easily integrated and looks like a very nice option for managing movies, because it accepts a wide variety of video formats and hardware. However, it does require a 1 MB download/installation before you can start uploading movies, which might not be optimal if you’re in an internet cafe. So… what do you think? You can respond to the question by voting in the poll, and you can clarify your answer by leaving a comment.

{democracy:2}

FuzzyMapper

The most frequent type of email I get from Fuzzy Travel users is: ‘Can you add these locations for me?’ The answer from now on is: yes I can, but so can you!! Via this blog post I’m introducing FuzzyMapper ^Beta, a Google Maps application that gives you visual access to the entire location database. It basically serves two functions:

• You can select a location visually (as an alternative to the standard text-based method).
• You can add new locations.

The latter function is of course the most useful, and adding your own locations can be done quite easily. It works like this: fire up FuzzyMapper from within the Member Area, and zoom in to the country and region where you’d like to add a location that’s not yet in the database. Then, click on the spot where your missing location is at. Enter the location’s name and — voila! — the location has been added to the location database.

To clarify, here are some screenshots that detail the process of adding a location that was not yet in the location database, namely ‘Drochia’ in Moldova.

Step 1. Open FuzzyMapper by clicking on the colored markers (you’ll find these near every location input field in the Member Area):

Step 2. FuzzyMapper opens in a new screen. On the initial world map select the country you want to zoom to, which in this case is Moldova:

Step 3. Move and zoom on the country map until you’ve spotted the ‘missing location’. Then, click on the map on that spot, and a marker with an input field will pop up. Type in the location name (in this example Drochia):

Step 4. Finally, hit the ‘Add location!’ button and the location will be added immediately to the location database.

Introducing: Development Blog

Welcome to the Fuzzy Travel development blog! From now on, http://blog.fuzzytravel.com/ will be the place where new features and the latest announcements will be placed with regard to your free online travelogue at FuzzyTravel.com. One of the reasons for moving things over to this blog is that it is easier to manage. The old ‘News’ page was already getting quite large, and because I hope to announce many more new features in the future… well, this blog just handles things better. Another important reason is that this blog also offers the possibility of feedback and interaction. And of course I encourage you to do so!
All previous Fuzzy Travel news announcements have been imported to this blog, and visiting the old News page will redirect you here, just to make sure that nobody gets lost. And like before, the most recent entries of this blog will be shown on the Fuzzy Travel homepage as well as in the Member Area, so that you won’t miss any important announcements.

View your trip in Google Earth

If you’re a Google Earth user, here’s some good news. You can now export your travel map as a KML file so that you can view it in Google Earth (Google’s wicked program that allows you to explore the world on your PC). Your travel route and your journal entries are exported in the file, so it basically provides the same data as your online map. Of course Google Earth provides a lot more flexibility and many more features, such as the cool experience of flying over a 3D landscape (of which a snapshot is shown in the accompanying picture).

So where can you find that KML file? Well, you’ll notice a new small icon directly under your map, which looks exactly like the image to the left of this text. Clicking on that icon will open your travel map’s KML file in Google Earth. (Tip: give the ‘Play Tour’ option a try!)

We hope you and your visitors will enjoy this new Fuzzy Travel feature. And if you’re not a Google Earth user yet: I can highly recommend you to download and start using it! It’s a wonderful way of exploring the world from behind your computer. It shows even the most remote locations in great detail, and literally puts “the world’s geographic information at your fingertips”. Check out http://earth.google.com/ for more details.

Blog entry preview

While writing or editing a blog entry, the ‘Preview’ button is a very useful tool to check out what your message will look like when you publish it, without actually publishing it (yet). For example, it can be used for re-reading and spell-checking your entry, or making sure that all markup and pictures show up correctly. We’re glad to announce that previewing your journal messages has just gotten better: it will now display the blog entry in your travelogue template, so that you can see exactly what it will look like once it’s online.

Immediate picture uploading

When uploading new pictures in the Member Area, you’ll see that things look a bit differently. Instead of being limited to uploading five images at a time, you can now upload an unlimited amount of pictures by using just one ‘Browse…’ input field. After having selected your picture, the upload will begin start right away in the background, and you can immediately use the ‘Browse…’ input field again for uploading the next picture. Handling picture uploads this way will save you quite a bit of waiting time, and on top of that provides you with a clear overview of the status of your pictures being uploaded.

(With thanks to Martin Conicek).

Finding your location

Keeping things simple and making things easy to use for everyone is one of the challenges in which Fuzzy Travel tries to excel. We think we did a pretty nice job on the improved location search. While you type, matching locations will be displayed. Click the one you were looking for, and you’re done!

This new method of finding locations effectively gets rid of one button and three drop-down lists, which makes things visually a whole lot more comprehensible. Feedback is welcome, as always.