In the past months we’ve been quietly working on a new release of Fuzzy Travel. This blog post introduces the new version, which has just been placed online. We’ll mention the highlights here, and we’re confident that you’ll find out the rest on your own.
Blog
WYSIWYG! Eh? What You See Is What You Get! No more inserting any codes to make your text bold or insert links. You can now style your entries just like you would when using a regular text editor.
Tagging
You can now add ‘tags’ — or descriptive keywords — to all of your blog entries, pictures and videos. This allows you to find back your stuff per tag, and to find others’ stuff that have the same tag. We’d like to encourage you to tag all of your previous blog entries, pictures and videos, and start tagging your new stuff as well.
Pictures
Quite a few changes here. First of all, the photo uploader has been replaced with a new one. The new uploader gives you feedback on the upload progress of your pictures, and allows you to select multiple files at once. This makes uploading (many) travel pictures a lot less work.
You can now add a date, a location, and tags to your pictures as well, for better organization. And to alleviate the process of adding these data, Fuzzy Travel now examines the Exif data of your uploaded pictures. If Exif data are available, we’ll use those to suggest the appropriate date and location for your pictures.
Also, you can now order your pictures by changing their dates. Not being able to order your pictures after you’ve uploaded them has been an annoyance, we know.
Finally, pictures are from now on automatically assigned to your blog entries. Previously, you could choose a blog entry where the picture would be shown. From now on, based on the dates of your blog posts and on the dates of your pictures, your pictures will show up automatically to the post it date-wise belongs to.
Map
Your map markers will no longer just show the last blog entry, but all blog entries, as well as the pictures and videos from that location. This makes your map a much cooler navigation tool through your entire travel blog!
Also, there are a few new options for displaying your map. You can now further personalize the look of your map by choosing the colors of your markers and the colors of your travel route.
And with this release we’ve switched to a different location database as well. It has about 3 times more locations than the old location database, so you should be able to find even the more exotic locations. Of course you can still manually add unknown locations using the Mapper tool (which has been improved upon as well by the way).
Sidebar
Be the boss of your own sidebar! Don’t like the ‘sign up for email notifications’? Want to show your blog’s tag cloud instead? Through an easy drag & drop page you can now manage the contents of your sidebar, and order the sidebar widgets to your own liking.
Character support
We never really realized there would be non-English Fuzzy Travelers. There are plenty though, which is great of course. To name a few nationalities: we’ve seen Dutch, German, Czech, Slovakian, French… Unfortunately, support for different alphabets other than Latin (English) has been rather poor. Cyrilic characters would show up as question marks, and so on. Well, those days are over. From now on you can use whichever characters you prefer: Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Chinese… Oh yeah, English will still be supported too! 😉
Templates
We’ve tried to make the transition to the new version as smooth as possible for everyone. However, we’ve had to drop some of the old templates, and we’ve added some new ones. So if you’re wondering why your travelogue looks so different all of a sudden, that’s why. Also, the new templates have room for a bigger header picture. So if you had already uploaded your personal header image, it’s been stretched a bit to make it fit into the new templates. Please re-upload your header image for a better-looking, non-stretched version.
Well, enough new features for one blog post. We hope you’ll enjoy the new version of Fuzzy Travel. If you have any feedback, questions, suggestions, complaints, or bug reports, please let us know! Leave a comment to this blog post, or use the contact page. We’ll be listening.
