Creating a site to share your travels on a map
I know, it seems simple and boring, but it was mainly to improve my skills in the webdev world. I started this journey 8-9 months ago and I love it.
With this website I wanted to learn Next.js, Bootsrap, and Firebase. It's been 3 months; I learned a lot!
But now that the "core loop" is functional, I think it could be useful for some people so I wanted to share it with you and know what you think about it :)
How does it work?
- Each user has their own worldmap on their personal page.
- On this map, they can add a pin with an address and a title, it will automatically create an article linked with this pin.
- Users can edit their articles with TinyMCE, upload as many images as they want and embed videos.
The main idea was inspired by the image linked in this topic.
I was always impressed by seeing that type of map in my friend's house and I knew there was a story behind each little pin. I wanted to have a system where you could share that story and link it to a little pin, just like the real map!
If you want to see a map, here is an example: https://www.travelogue.earth/etheon2
Tell me what you think and feel free to give suggestions!
Thanks
Hi Michael - Totally love the idea! Way to go with your learnings on Next.JS, Bootstrap, and Firebase. I am curious, how did you go about handling auth with Next? Are you using Firebase auth?
I think one huge benefit here would be integrations. Could you import photos from your Apple Photos, Google Photos, etc? Also, would you want to connect or link some content from your Facebook/IG/Etc. to compliment your trips / blogs on your platform.
Here are some other pieces of feedback:
I would create a profile or avatar card that you can follow, so you can view your friends, stats about how many trips / countries they visited, etc.
It would be nice to have a feed, of your trips newest to oldest so you can easily view photos, or click to read the trip blog post
It may be good to have the ability to link externally to a blog post you wrote for a particular trip, so you could handle in your platform or easily link to your travel or personal blog
What if you go away? I think users need to know that they can export their data, or it's safe to spend years potentially updating and posting content on your platform, travel is very near and dear to people
Formatting on CSS is off for https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001CMV1VW/?tag=thewire06-20&linkCode=xm2&ascsubtag=AwEAAAAAAAAAAPW5
Features and About button appear to not work correctly
Let me know if you'd like to talk more offline about this.
Good work!
Mike
Hi Mike and thank you for your valuable feedback! I'll add that to my waaaaay to big to-do list :p Integrations with several services is a good idea.
The auth system is handle by Firebase yes, really easy to use, same for the firestore database or firebase storage!
Regarding Features and About button yep, the site is still work in progress and I wanted to share it with you really early.
Thanks again your ideas are really great!
Very cool idea! It'd be neat if you partnered with someone to print the maps and maybe a a little book with their articles. Might be a good way to get some extra income from email marketing sometime down the road.
Print a book with the map and the articles is a great idea. I thought about it a few weeks ago but I have to find a website that can do it!
Hey Michael, I think it's a great idea! So much so that a friend an I actually built this product ourselves (called SpaceTime, iOS-only for now).
As a fair warning, I should say we haven't seen too much traction by it yet. We launched literally weeks before Covid took off and the quarantines killed the tiny bit of momentum the app had. So since then, we've had to stay light on our feet and have been focusing on other projects instead.
Though that said, we haven't been doing any marketing for it and have seen the DAUs tick up a tiny amount in the last 2 weeks. I'm not sure how users are finding the app, but people certainly seem to be leaving the house more again.
If you're really interested in building this, you might also want to checkout Swarm by Foursquare. They're by far the biggest app of this kind out there. We've tried to position SpaceTime as a less-gamified, less-gimmicky, less-privacy-invasive, private alternative to Swarm. With Covid and our lack of attention paid to this project, it's hard to say if that positioning really has legs or not. But looking at the Swarm app reviews it seems like it would.. we just haven't yet turned our attention back to SpaceTime and been actively trying to get the app in front of that audience.
Hope some of these thoughts help!
Link to SpaceTime
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spacetime-map-your-day/id1471555086?ls=1
Oh I'd love to try your app unfortunately I don't have an iPhone :(
Cool name by the way ^^
Did you try to reach communities on Reddit for example?
Nah unfortunately we never even got to that. We basically shipped the version of SpaceTime that's out there now, and then Covid really started taking off in Europe/US over the subsequent couple weeks. It didn't seem like a great time to be marketing a travel journal so we instead started building two other things:
A community for students who lost their internships due to Covid (https://summerofshipping.com). This one grew a lot off of Reddit and now is at a couple hundred participants.
An incredibly simple API for adding authentication to your apps (https://feather.id). From our prior experience building apps and talking with people in the Summer of Shipping community, we noticed building authentication flows are a relative nuisance (risky, boring boilerplate). So our goal is to get down to a ~1 minute integration from the hour/day/week it usually takes people to do this. This project is still in the works, but we'll be pushing it more soon :)
The password validation is messed up because of
pattern="^(?=.*[A-Za-z])(?=.*\d)[A-Za-z\d]{8,}$". Other thanmin_lengthof 8, please don't validate passwords like this in the frontend, it serves no purpose, just creates friction. That regex won't work fora1b2c3e4f5for example.I tried putting the password "japoco8912@wkernl.com".
Also, how do I write an article? I can just put the title, be damned if I figure out how I attach a story to the place.
Hi and thank you for your feedback! I need to check this pattern...
Do you think this type of verification in the frontend is useless?
For the article, your just have to click on your marker, read the article, and you'll have a little "edit" button next to the title. It's not that great actually and I have to find a better way!