Author: byron

We released an update last night with some improvements and bug fixes.

Improved Tripit Import

• Our Tripit import process now extracts much more data from your itineraries and orders correctly by date and time.  We’re also pulling items without location data so you can add locations during the import process.

• We’re also pulling the title of your trip and giving you the option to set visibility before creating your trip.  These changes apply not just to Tripit, but also Foursquare, Twitter and Gowalla based trips.

• Finally, we used to open the trip editor at the end of the import process, but we’re now just loading the trip page.  We think it’s a better experience this way.  Just click [Open Editor] to add/delete places, change the soundtrack etc.

• NOTE:  Our Tripit import process ignores map and directions objects since these items don’t fit into the Tripline structure.

• NOTE:  If you had been seeing an “Error creating trip” message for imports of more than 25 items, that problem is also fixed.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed a problem with our thumbnail generator that was causing thumbnails to break for trips with between 18 and 25 points.  If you currently have a broken thumbnail, open your trip in the editor and save it.  The thumbnail should re-generate correctly.

• We added some more stringent data checks in the [Save Trip] function to completely prevent trips from breaking due to  invisible & special characters in text fields.

• We updated the trip player to resize correctly when posted to Facebook.  Due to Facebook’s caching mechanisms, it may take a bit of time for this change to propagate.

Please contact us if you have any questions,

– Byron

Happy New Year! We’ve been busy over the past few weeks and we’ve just released some major updates to Tripline. Here’s the breakdown of new features and bug fixes:

Tripline on Facebook
Our long awaited Facebook app is live! Now you can do everything you can do on Tripline right inside Facebook and also easily see where your friends have traveled. So, check it out and get your friends to sign up: https://apps.facebook.com/tripline

Adding People To Trips
You can now add your Facebook friends to your trips or invite people by email in the [+] add friends dialog on the trip page. When they sign up or connect to Tripline, they’ll have an invitation waiting for them in their inbox so they can join the trip in a single step.

One thing to note is that due to Facebook limitations, when you add Facebook friends, there’s a second step to notify them in Facebook.  We did our best to make the process as simple as possible, but you will have to enter their names twice.  Hopefully Facebook will enable more streamlined notification mechanisms soon so we can eliminate the two-step process.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed date sorting functionality in Editor
• Fixed a bug that was preventing more than 10 people from being added to a trip
• Eliminated an issue that was causing trips to break when text with invisible special characters was pasted into waypoint descriptions
• Fixed a bug that was preventing links with apostrophes from opening correctly on the trip page

I hope you guys enjoy the Facebook App, and stay tuned for some more exciting updates coming soon.  As always, if you have any questions or comments, contact us here.

– Byron

Hi folks. We launched some exciting new features on Tripline today.  Here’s the list:

• Automatically create trips from geotagged (and non-geotagged) photos – Many of you have asked about this, so we’re excited to announce that you can now create trips just by uploading a collection of photos! We’ll use the date/time and geotags on your uploaded photos to automatically create the locations in your trip. It’s incredibly easy and lots of fun. If you don’t have geotagged photos, we’ll create groups based on date/time and you can easily add the location info manually. Go to Tripline and click [Create] in the header to check it out.

• Bookmark your favorite trips – We’ve added a [+ Bookmark] button to the trip page so you can easily save your favorite trips. Bookmarks give you quick access to someone else’s trip you’re following as well as trips that you might want to use as a guide while traveling. Bookmarks will show up on your Home Page, on your My Trips page and are also available on Tripline Mobile: http://mobile.tripline.net

• Videos on the trip page – You can now add videos from YouTube and Vimeo to your trips. All you have to do is paste a YouTube/Vimeo link into a place description and the embedded video will display when you reload the page. Note that embedded videos won’t yet display in the player…that’s something we’ll add in a future release. Oh, and if you add a link to another Tripline trip, it will show up as an embedded player as well. Great for creating trips within trips!

• Line breaks in trip and place descriptions – Many of you have asked for this. You can now add line/paragraph breaks to your trip/place descriptions and they’ll display correctly.

• Page translation – You can now translate any page on Tripline into the language of your choice. Just click on the globe icon at the top right of the header and select a language (53 available). It’s page-by-page for now.

• Other new features and bug fixes
• We’re now displaying trip distances in kilometers as well as miles
• We added a confirmation prompt before deleting waypoints in the editor
• We fixed a bug that was preventing navigation to the second page of a Facebook photo album
• We fixed a photoviewer bug that was preventing caption entry for panoramic photos
• We fixed a photo upload bug that was causing uploads to stall when photos were added to the upload list multiple times

Thanks again for all the great suggestions.  As always, if you need to get in touch with us, send an email to support@tripline.net

– Byron

It’s been another busy week at Tripline HQ. About an hour ago, we released an update to the site that includes the following:

• Import from Gowalla – You can now connect your Tripline account to Gowalla and import your checkins and trips. It’s another great way to tell your stories. More information here: http://help.tripline.net/gowalla

• Import photos from Picasa – You can now import photos from Picasa!   Lots of people were asking for this so we’re happy we were able to get it done quickly.  Just click the camera icon on the trip page and Picasa is the second tab, right in between Flickr and Facebook.  Note that Picasa provides access to very large images, so some of your pics may fill the screen.  We’re thinking about limiting the displayed size, so let us know what you think:  http://help.tripline.net/contact-support

• Improved photo upload – We were seeing some issues with our photo upload process that were causing incomplete uploads in certain cases and broken trips in other cases.  We’ve fixed the problems and improved the upload process a bit.  Note, you’ll still need to refresh the page before newly uploaded photos will play in a slideshow.

• Bio and links on profile pages – You can now add a short bio and links to your user profile.  Go to http://www.tripline.net/myaccount to enter a bio.  You can add links right on your profile page.  Perfect place for links to your blog, or your profile on other social networks.

• Links in text fields – Now when you enter links in trip descriptions, place descriptions comments and reviews, they will be automatically turned into clickable links.

Have fun people, we’re back to work on more stuff now 🙂

Well, week 1 is behind us and it’s been quite a ride. Aside from a few small hiccups (which I’ll get to in a bit), everything has gone pretty well. What’s been most amazing to me is the traffic from around the globe. While a majority of our traffic has been from the US, we’ve seen a ton of people coming in from Japan, Europe, Canada, India, South America and Australia. We have the beginnings of a global community, and I hope to see that continue.

A few stats from week 1:

• 11,575 unique visitors
• 1,584 registered users
• 2,268 trips created
• 24,649 waypoints created
• 12,227 photos added
• Average time spent on the site: 4.27 minutes
• 81% of people using Firefox, Chrome or Safari
• Almost as many iPad users as iPhone (wow)

After spending the first few days monitoring the site and fixing some of the bugs that came up, we’ve jumped right back into the code to make some important updates we weren’t able to get to before launch. We’re also working on a few new things that we hope you like. It’s been great to see the feedback so far, and we’re going to do our best to get you the features you want as soon as we can.

The notable bugs we discovered during the first week were two separate issues that were causing trips to break.  The first one was caused by deleting just-uploaded photos before refreshing the page.  The second one was caused by ampersand symbols ( & ) at a certain position in address fields.  We’ve fixed both of these (and did our best to rebuild any trips that were affected – that’s our penance). We also discovered an issue for Android users on our mobile site.  There’s a detailed explanation here. I hope you understand that these types of things are part of the Beta process and forgive us if there are problems here and there.

In terms of missing functionality or things that don’t work as well as you’d like, the two main areas where people seem to be frustrated are import from Foursquare and import from Twitter.  We’re working on both of those to make the experience a lot better.

Since we’re only three people, we won’t be able to blog or tweet or email as much as we’d like while we’re in development mode, so we hope you understand if we go quiet from time to time.  If you need to reach us, shoot an email to support@tripline.net and we’ll respond as soon as we can.  That’s usually pretty quick, unless of course it’s the middle of the night.

Thanks for making this a great first week,

– Byron