Planned maintenance for 28 Oct ‘07

Fuzzy Travel will go offline for maintenance on Sunday, 28 October, 2007 at 20:00 UTC/GMT (find out what day/time that is in your time zone). During this maintenance you will not be able to use Fuzzy Travel. The downtime should not last more than a few hours.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause. We will be releasing a new version of Fuzzy Travel, and this cannot be done while the service is running. When Fuzzy Travel is up again, details of the new version will be placed on this blog.

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Fuzzy Travel goes Dutch: Reislogger.nl

Fresh on the web: Reislogger, a new and improved version of Fuzzy Travel. If you speak Dutch and want to start using the current beta version, you are hereby invited!

http://www.reislogger.nl/register

Support for OpenID

Fuzzy Travel has just integrated support for OpenID. “What’s that?” you may well ask. Well, OpenID allows for a single sign-on across various websites, so that you no longer have to create/remember a wide variety of usernames and passwords that you use on the internet.

New Fuzzy Travel users can now register themselves using OpenID, and from then on use OpenID as their method of logging in.

Existing members can make the switch from the username/password login to the OpenID login by entering their OpenID URL in the login screen, and follow the instructions.

If you’re interested to learn more about OpenID, this screencast gives a pretty good introduction.

Please note that OpenID is an alternative method of logging in that exists next to the normal username/password login, so using it is completely optional. But if you want to use OpenID, now you can!

Assigning pictures to entries

You can easily and quickly place pictures in your travel journal entries by assigning pictures to them. They will then automatically appear under your journal entry. One of our travel bloggers pointed out the following on this subject:

When I post a new journal and my subscribers are notified, I
would like to have all my pictures in place. However, to finish editing
the pictures, they need to belong to a specific journal. If I create the
journal first my subscribers get notified. How can I get around this
chicken/egg situation?

From now on, when editing your pictures’ info, the dropdown list of journal entries — to which you can assign your pictures — contains a new option: “Next entry I publish”. If you select that option, the picture will not yet get assigned to any existing journal entry. However, when you write and publish a new entry in your travel journal, all pictures that belong to that “next entry” will automatically be assigned to it. This should save you some precious internet time.

Slideshow of your pictures

On request from a member, you can now view your pictures as a slideshow. This provides an easy way for your visitors to get a visual impression of your travels — without having to click around.

Features:

• Images get preloaded for smooth transitions.
• A fading effect in between the pictures (in most browsers).
• Adjust the speed of the slideshow with a slider control.
• Buttons to manually control the slideshow (pause, play, previous, next).
• View a slideshow of all pictures, or select only pictures from a specific album.
• The displayed picture links to the picture page where people can rate / comment on it.

You can find your picture slideshow at fuzzytravel.com/user/pictures/slideshow.html. Or you can simply follow the link to the slideshow on your picture overview pages. 😉

Travelogue search

Apart from being able to search all Fuzzies at once, you can now search in your own Fuzzy as well. When at your personal travel blog site, you’ll see that the search box in the top right corner now lists the option to either search your blog only, or all blogs.

Searching your own blog will lead to a results page of matches in your journal entries, pictures, videos and comments.

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}