PlanetEye

March 11th, 2009

New Release - Notes, Blogs, and Maps

Adam Bullied: Director, Product Management

It’s been a while since we’ve posted! Rest assured, it’s because we’ve been hard at work on some great new things that will make PlanetEye even better, and easier, to use while planning your trips.

Travel Pack Notes / Journal

The first thing we’ve added is the ability to record a journal, in the format of notes, along with each photo and place you have added to your Travel Packs. You can check out a live example of notes in action within my Entourage Travel Pack.

You can use notes for a lot of different things - for example, recording your confirmation code for your hotel, or reminding yourself why you wanted to visit a certain place before you take your trip.

Once you return, they are a great way to provide some context around what you did while you were there for family and friends. Of course, you can always write a general review, but great to take it one step further and go in to a bit more detail.

That’s exactly what each note is there to capture. You may be asking, “how can I take these notes with me on my trip?” Well, you can now print out an entire Travel Pack in a very simple and clean format.

Printing Travel Packs

One of the biggest requests we’ve received since we introduced Travel Packs was to have an easy way to print out their contents to take them with you on your trip. This is now easy to do by using the “Print Travel Pack” link.

You can see an example of a print view for one of my Travel Packs to get an idea of how it looks.

Setting Travel Pack Dates

One of the most important aspects of planning a trip is actually identifying the dates you are going to be there. This comes a bit later in the planning process, but there is now a pretty simple way to do that for each location within a Travel Pack.

We’ve always thought of Travel Packs as part-itinerary, but also part idea catcher. This is why dates aren’t required when setting up a Travel Pack, and they aren’t needed to organize each thing by the day - trips are meant to be free-flowing - many times you think you are going one place a certain day, but end-up somewhere completely different.

Blogging Tools

OK, a quick break from Travel Pack enhancements for a sec. One of the great things we’ve added is the ability for anyone with a blog to easily geotag their content and have their posts appear on PlanetEye as user reviews.

Within your profile, you will now see a check box labeled “Import my travel-related posts.” By entering a valid blog URL (it must have a valid RSS feed containing your content), checking this box, and then saving your profile - each time you write a post that links back to a PlanetEye city or place, an excerpt will appear and link back to your blog post.

For example, if you were to write a post about the Peninsula in Chicago, all you would need to do is either:

Link there using the URL for the place on PlanetEye
Embed a Google Map in your blog post that points to that place

You can see the post where I geotagged a restaurant in Toronto called Takesushi, where I had dinner tonight - and how it has been pulled in and shows up on the Takesushi Resturant page on PlanetEye.com as a user review.

We have some more in-depth documentation going live later on in the week that will step through additional details. Always feel free to e-mail me with any questions or comments you have.

Embedded Travel Packs

Now, probably one of the coolest things we’ve put together is the ability to embed complete Travel Packs in to blog posts, websites, and the like. Check out a live example of the Entourage Travel Pack I mentioned above.

Simply visit the page for the Travel Pack you want to embed, and click the “Embed Travel Pack” link.

You will be presented with a pop-up that contains some HTML code that you can copy and paste and put anywhere you like.

That’s it! We’ll be posting detailed documentation later this week to step through adding this to posts on popular blogging platforms, and more information.

As always, if you have any comments, questons or feedback feel free to contact me directly.

Tags: blogging, blogs, maps, travelpacks, widgets

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 3:09 am and is filed under PlanetEye. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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