I’ve decided to have a shot at a geo-located blog again. Ages ago I put together a hack job using yahoo tubes, google calendar and google mashup to kind of give you blog that you could navigate either by date or map. It didn’t work very well, wasn’t fun to put input data in, and I gave up fairly quick. Now google mashups doesn’t exist anymore (
although a similar app does in google apps) and finding my old google sites made me think: It’s time; I’m going to find something that works. And so the hunt began. This time I’d also like it to be somehow compatible with google sites. At first it looked like a travel blog was the way to go. Sadly most of these didn’t give me the navigation elements, or control that I wanted. And in almost all, I’d loose the data if they found it offensive. Really what I’m hoping for is just a blog that can have structured data for your location and a few other things like the weather, then also a few gadgets for things like making it navigatable via topic, calendar and map. Wait, lets put this into a list. They’re always nicer to read:
- embedded map that:
- depends on posts
- can be viewed like a trip
- doesn’t get too cluttered
- can be embedded in individual posts
- being able to clip what is contained in the map could be nice
- isn’t slow
- compatibility with mobile devices (ie. my android phone)
- some other cool fields like weather
- wow, that’s not a lot really…
But guess what? Blogger is adding geotagging!! Now all I need to do is to make a cool gadget or find someone else’s.
BlurbBits seems like an early contender for taking information out of the blog, and parsing it into a navigation element. I think I’ll go with this approach for now and let you know how it goes later. In the mean time I’ll be reading a bit at
Google maps Mania and reading through a few of
these ideas from travel bloggers using Blogger. Since I’ve already done a bit of research into the travel blogs, I figure I may as well summarise what I’ve found too.
Here’s a list of the ones I found (I’ll be editing this soon):
- TravelPod
- Travelblog
- Travellerspoint (really good for planning trips and getting info)
- Travbuddy (seemed to have some promise)
- Dopplr (had some cool maps build up of things people have liked, along with a mobile site)
- Everlater
- Bootsnall
- Offexploring (hardly worth mentioning)
I found a few different reviews.
This one gives a nice review of TravelPod, Travelblog and Travellerspoint but it’s over a year old and doesn’t seem very accurate when it talks about the maps but this seems common for these reviews. I think TravelPod just updated their mapping stuff, but then it would seem that Travellerspoint’s was also nerfed.
This review goes over a few ideas in general for a self hosted blog. If you go to
IzunoTravel you’ll find a nice table summarising different travel blog features with a nice write up too.
On a largely unrelated note, these
terrariums are cool. I think I’ll make one.