http://travelgeneration.com/footer/development-blog/ http://travelgeneration.com/footer/development-blog/where-travel-generation-is-going/ <p>Hi, I'm Mat Weir, director and lead developer at Xebidy. I took over lead development of Travel Generation a few months ago and have brought travelgeneration.com through to its current incarnation.</p>
<p>Travel Generation is a site where you:</p>
<ol><li>Collect and discover travel related information, </li>
<li>Organise that information into travel plans, </li>
<li>Share your plans, experiences and travel information with friends, family and other devices or software. </li>
</ol><p>Keeping these three goals in mind, I'd like to talk about where we're going with Travel Generation.</p>
<p>Our focus on the design has been on the usability of the travel planning interface where we have made a number of improvements to make it easier to create and manage events and bookmarks.</p>
<p>You would have noticed the new home page and perhaps wondered what's going on. Every few hours we pick the most popular bookmark from the database and feature it on the home page. This gives you the ability to find out what's interesting and popular in travel right now.</p>
<p>Feedback so far has been that, whilst there is a bunch of fresh content there, it's not very categorised or relevant. For example, once a bookmark has featured it is no longer eligible to be on the home page. This works well for news bookmarks, but once a hostel has featured it won't appear again even though it may be all the rage. So, whilst we're building up a bunch of data (both bookmarks, travel stories and their popularity) the goal is to structure the home page into sections including latest travel stories (from the blog), latest popular news bookmarks, currently popular accommodation, destinations, events, transport and eating/drinking joints, plus a new category for popular travel plans from public travel plans that you create.</p>
<p>Happy travels and thanks for joining us with Travel Generation.</p> Thu, 06 May 2010 14:50:40 +1200 http://travelgeneration.com/footer/development-blog/where-travel-generation-is-going/ http://travelgeneration.com/footer/development-blog/claiming-technorati-blog/ <div id="heroImage">
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<p><span class="status action"><strong>AMSEJEW94PEB</strong></span></p> Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:14:27 +1300 http://travelgeneration.com/footer/development-blog/claiming-technorati-blog/ http://travelgeneration.com/footer/development-blog/travel-generation-on-top-travelling-voting-site/ <div id="heroImage">
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<p>For good or for bad we are listed on this site called top travelling sites:<br/><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.toptravelingsites.net/"><img src="http://www.toptravelingsites.net/banner/xebidy/a1.gif" alt="Top Traveling Sites"/></a></p> Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:51:06 +1300 http://travelgeneration.com/footer/development-blog/travel-generation-on-top-travelling-voting-site/ http://travelgeneration.com/footer/development-blog/travel-generation-development-101/ <div id="heroImage">
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<p><img class="right size-medium wp-image-3753" src="http://travelgeneration.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/logo-300x80.png" alt="Xebidy Logo" title="Xebidy Logo" width="300" height="80"/></p>
<p>Gidday folks.</p>
<p>My name is Chris Rae, I’ve been working on Travel Generation for a touch over 6 months as the primary developer.</p>
<p>A huge amount of work goes into the project, and only some of it is ever seen by the end-user. Travel Generation existed both conceptually and as a piece of software long before I came along thanks to the efforts of staff older and wiser than myself - I’ve just helped it along the way.</p>
<p>Everyone likes to think they’re getting the inside scoop. This section of the blog was designed to fill that need, it’s purpose is to allow developers to keep the users informed.</p>
<p>I can’t promise the sort of prolific content generation Dan manages to deliver on the front page, but I can at least in some small way contribute every now and again.</p>
<p>Right, that’s the airy fairy nonsense out of the way - lets get down to business!</p>
<p>Here is a brief non-exhaustive list of updates which have gone live over the last few weeks:</p>
<li>Users can now add more images to bookmarks - this is achieved via the ‘Edit’ dialog when you look at a single bookmark. The button is called ‘Add Media’.</li>
<li>The ‘Recent Activity’ footer came to be - it displays travel and development blog content on the TG homepage and within the travel planner itself.</li>
<li>You can now print that travel plan you worked so hard on, and have it look reasonable!<br/> Make sure you click on ‘Show full plan’ before you try to print your itineraries though, otherwise you won’t have the full document! (printing is as simple as File - Print)</li>
<li>The travel stream went live, this allows us to see what we’re all up to! It displays lots of public content like what’s being bookmarked and who is registering for Travel Generation. It helps the community feel more ‘connected’.</li>
<li>You can now add a bookmark which doesn’t relate to a webpage! If you were watching the travel stream at all you might have seen things being bookmarked like ‘Beers with Sammy’. Now if I want to schedule something it doesn’t have to be webpage related, it can be any old event at all!<br/> You achieve this using the ‘Add item’ button in the travel planner. You can leave the ‘URL’ section empty.</li>
<li>Safari users should now be fully able to bookmark content using the bookmarker.</li>
<li>Users can now export their travel plans using the link ‘Outlook/iCal feed’ - it will give you an .ics file you can load into Outlook, Google Calendar, iCal or any other software that supports .ics</li>
<p>Hopefully that gives you some idea of what the team is up to, good luck with your travel planning!</p> Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:51:58 +1200 http://travelgeneration.com/footer/development-blog/travel-generation-development-101/