travList dev

Sorry for the downtime recently. This is supposed to be a project that is in "maintenance mode", because I don't have much time to work on it and I've been traveling during all my free time. This has run into two problems:

1) My old hosting company Dreamhost kicked me off because I was using too much resources for my cheap plan, and they wanted me to switch to one that was very pricey ($100 / month). So I had to scramble to deal with moving the whole thing somewhere else.

2) So, I found a new host, Hytek Hosting. They are great. But now the application just dies occasionally. I don't know why. I don't see any errors in the log or anything. You just get empty pages when this happens. When I notice, I restart it manually, but this is obviously awful, and I don't have a great solution.

So, I don't know what to do about #2. But that's where we are.

Good things:

1) I think I fixed all the major outstanding bugs like the 2008 thing.

2) I tweaked some performance stuff, and moved the database server, and it seems to be working much, much faster now. Maybe this will resolve the availability issues? I can dream.

Another few months have passed without many changes. I fixed a couple of bugs today: 1) placenames with apostrophes broke the maps, and 2) deleting trips and places wasn't working.

At the moment I'm a bit waylaid due to a broken arm. This also means I haven't been traveling, which is when I use the site myself and find things to fix. Look for new features in May or June.

I upgraded to Rails 1.1 today, just so I could deeper eager loading. What that means is that if I have a visit to a place, a place, and a country, I can get all that info in one database call. In Rails 1.0, you could only get the visit plus the place, then you had to look up the country again, for each place.

The upshot is that the site is much faster. There might be some bugs left around though, since I changed quite a lot.

I wanted to keep track of all the national parks I had visited, so I added tagging to places. For instance, my national park tag. Now it's officially a Web 2.0 app. Unless there's some other buzzword I'm missing. I have tags, RSS feeds, Ajax, Javascript, CSS. I think that just about covers it.

Also a bunch of minor changes, as always.

I changed the background to be a darker grey, and it has an abstract image on it.  It's supposed to represent travel routes or something.  You can barely see it though, so whatever.

Also, all the maps are now on v2 of the Google Maps API.  That gives better resolution, sometimes, and street maps in some random countries that aren't the US.  While I was at it,I changed the icons that are used to mark places.  They are a bit more plain but I think it's an improvement.  I think the route line may be a little light now.

What's next?  Not sure.  I have a lot of minor bugs in my list.  One thing I want to fix is the way that trips and dates work.  I want to remove the trip start date, and just use the date of the first stop for that, but that's kind of messy behind the scenes. 

I actually made some changes today:

• Streamlined creation of trips and places. Now you are only shown the required fields. You can still edit the others later.
  
• Improved the date selector. Now you can click on the start and end dates on the calendar to set them. Still a little buggy.
  
• You can do in-place editing of the trip title and all the dates.
  
• Switched about half the maps to V2 of the Google Maps API. Main benefit is roadmaps for non-US.
  

I think that's it for now.

Obviously I haven't done much on the site lately. It just got to the point where it was actually more useful to me as an app than as something to develop on. So I just use it as a user. There are still a few rough edges I want to clean up, but I don't know if I'm adding anything else major.

Update to my last post. This is 75% done. Now you can set the type of a note, where the types are food, hotel, flights, or plain. Then they are labeled as that type wherever they are shown.

With the framework in place, I can work on the details.

Some more ideas for features. Coming up with ideas is a lot easier than actually implementing them.

• Different types of notes. Currently I just have plain generic notes. I'm thinking of creating multiple types with fancy icons or something. I just have to think up some more types. The plain notes are good and I'd like to add a way to track flight info.
  
• Hotel field on place listings. I think this would be useful. Or maybe make it a note type. Not sure.
  
• Upgrade to Google Maps API v2. Supposed to be better.
  

I'm back from vacation and don't know what to do next. I've made a few superficial changes but I haven't been up for anything major yet.

Some ideas from my list:

• Improve the calendar by having little pop-up windows with more details, when you click on dates. Like Google Maps when you click a marker.
  
• Allow you to reorder places on a day. This is complicated UI-wise and complicated behind-the-scenes (since places may span multiple days.) But it is needed.
  
• More graphic doodads. I like icons.
  
• Alternate trip views. A calendar view might be fun.
  
• Tags. I don't know if they have a point, but they might be useful to some.
  
• YouTube integration. It's very simple to embed the movies and it would work just like the Flickr stuff. But 99% of people wouldn't use it and I don't want to clutter up the interface anymore. Very torn.
  

Edit: OK, I actually implemented the YouTube thing. You can see an embedded movie here. I still haven't resolved the interface stuff, so there is no interface. You have to add a photo and then change the URL to say "movie" instead. Work in progress.