PlanetEye

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Travel blogging with Wordpress

Juan Gonzalez

Vice President, Technology

For over a year now we have been helping a small group of travel bloggers use the PlanetEye platform to write and publish travel articles with the proper location information (usually represented in the form of a mini-map included in the article).

Back in October I wrote a post endorsing Microformats as a way for bloggers to include location information within their posts. With this post we had hoped that other bloggers would follow our lead on how to structure a travel article to include the correct geographic data. A few did, but many others argued that the process to create the correct Microformat was cumbersome and distracted them from writing a good travel article.

And so we took on the challenge of finding better and easier ways to enable the same kind of advanced travel blogging tools we had been offering our writers to a much larger audience. As part of this project, we migrated every one of our travel bloggers to Wordpress and rebuilt the tools they were used to as a Wordpress Plugin that is capable of finding places of interest and writing down the proper microformat. At the same time, whenever such microformat is used and our Plugin is active, a Google Map identifying the correct place will be shown at the top of the post. What does it look like?

For the blogger, we’ve kept things very simple: enter the name (or address) of a place, and pick from a list of potential matches. All of this is powered by Google Maps, but we’ve kept our servers in the loop and whenever someone adds a place that we didn’t know about, it will automatically be added to our site. When the article is published, that particular microformat will look like a simple link to a PlanetEye page, but will have the proper location information encoded for the map to render.

All feedback from the first group of bloggers using the Plugin is fantastic and we hope to make it available to a larger group of bloggers soon. If you are interested in integrating this Plugin into your own Wordpress blog, please leave a comment and we’ll get in touch.

If you want to see the Plugin in action, here are a few blogs that are using it: The Sydney Traveler, The Amsterdam Guide, The Boston Guide, The Berlin Guide, The Barcelona Guide, The Edinburgh Guide

• Posted in  Development, PlanetEye
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