Taking off Travel blog

Today I’d like to share with you one of my all time favorite online planning tools. It’s called Workflowy – and it works just as well for planning travel as for any other use. Workflowy starts from the premise that almost everything you do starts with a list, so when you first login to Workflowy, what you get is a blank page where you can make bulleted lists. Type and hit enter and you have a list item. Keep repeating till you run out of things to list. So far, so good, but there are lots of listing tools, so what gives Workflowy the edge? Several things, and I’ll illustrate by sharing how I set up my account.

Planning a Trip to Europe

As well as projects, goals, blog ideas, thoughts and links, I started a list item for my planned trip to Europe. I wanted one place to collect all the stuff I needed to think about. Once I’d created the main heading, I double clicked on the bullet point to create a new page with that list item as the main heading. On that page, I created a number of sub-items for the issues I wanted to look at, such as the countries I wanted to include, the accommodation to investigate, and some possible sightseeing targets in each country. Then I could add sub-items for each item. For example, under things to see in Spain, I could add Barcelona (yes, I do mean the whole city!), the Sagrada Familia, etc.

Workflowy Features

Workflowy has drag and drop, which means I can easily reorder items if I need to. I can also add notes to each list item, which is useful for more detail or to keep track of links related to a particular task I want to carry out. Every time I complete a task, a line goes through it, and I can choose to keep completed items hidden or visible. I can delete items that are no longer relevant, and I can also export the entire list (or a portion of it) and share lists with people, which could be useful if more than one person is involved in trip planning.

I find Workflowy an excellent tool for all sorts of uses. You can do a brain dump when you are initially thinking about a trip, then refine your thoughts by adding other considerations as sub-items and changing the order of items to reflect their importance. Workflowy also has search and tagging. And there’s one more good thing about Workflowy – it’s got a restful user interface. It looks like a page with a list and it never gets overwhelming because you can keep main list items collapsed and only expand when you want to see the sub-items.

Have you ever tried Workflowy as a travel planning tool? What do you think of it?

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I was recently asked to take a look at TripSofa. This is a question and answer site for travel. In its own words:  “Tripsofa was founded with one single goal in mind: make finding great travel information easy”.

TripSofa Home Page

The Tripsofa home page is impressive, consisting of a map (currently centered on the outskirts of Rome) with a box at the top where you can ask questions and check out the latest site activity. Sign up for the site to ask questions or provide an answer via the comment form (complete with captcha) below each question. TripSofa looks like it’s trying to be Quora for travel and its ais are good. According to the founders, Tripsofa aims to end the annoyance of outdated information: “the site will be continuously updated by our members and staff so that travelers can easily find a wealth of travel-related information without getting annoyed by excessive advertising”.

TripSofa Interface

There’s no denying that the site has a clean, uncluttered interface, with just one simple text ad block above the lists of questions. It’s easy to see which questions have answers and to search for information about areas of interest. You can also check out popular tags or all questions. In the all questions view, you can see hot topics, most voted, most answered and most viewed questions. At the moment, there’s not that much activity, with the top question on the day I checked only having 20 answers. Most were far fewer than that.

TripSofa – My Verdict

At the moment, I’d file TripSofa under interesting, but not yet that useful for me. I’d like to see an easy way to focus the map on the area you want to travel to, and see the questions that have been asked and answered there.  I’d also like to see navigation to all the site options from each page, instead of having to hunt around if you’re not in the right view. If more people participate, TripSofa could be a good resource. We’ll have to see how the site develops.

I love my Nokia smartphone and on my recent trip it once again proved its worth as one of my favorite travel accessories. I’ve had it for a couple of years and have previously written about the Ovi Maps application which is now better than ever. Instead of hiring GPS when we picked up our rental from the Fort Lauderdale airport parking lot, we opted to go with the built-in application. After all, it couldn’t possibly be any worse than the Gremlin.

Having learned my lesson from the last trip, where the maps failed to load after a software update, I decided not to install the latest update and just go with what I had. I’d already installed the voice guidance files and was hopeful that it would work well when it was time to travel. I got started while waiting for the rental car paperwork by switching on the Maps application so I could store the rental car center for our return trip. That worked well, and since I already had the hotel details stored, I tested the system.

It took a while to load up, but then suddenly chimed in with the right directions. We named our GPS voice (which was in UK English) Jane, and she got us safely to our hotel without incident. A couple more tests on the first day showed that she knew what she was talking about, so we felt comfortable trying her on a longer trip to a sporting goods store we hadn’t visited before. Once we’d searched for the name and zip code, navigation was simple.

Other things I noticed in this trial:

• Using GPS really takes a toll on the battery, so an in-car charger is a must. We had one, but occasionally the movement of the car jolted it and it didn’t actually charge.
• Since it took a while to find the current location whenever the app started, sometimes we got some strange distances and times for navigation as Jane assumed we were at our last known position.
• There’s a great feature that allows you to estimate trip time. We didn’t really make the most of this.

The one time we didn’t use Jane we really regretted it. We’d had what we thought were straightforward directions from the staff at an eco-reserve we were planning to visit. What we didn’t know was that there was no sign for State Road 31 from the highway. If we’d had Jane switched on, we’d have saved an hour, made our booking and been able to squeeze in another trip. Lesson learned!

All in all, Ovi Maps is a great application and it has one major advantage – you can download the maps and use them offline so it’s not constantly searching for updates. I’d love to see Nokia make this into a standalone app which could run on other platforms.

(Photo: vermegrigio)

When we’re on a trip, the question that’s always on our minds is ‘where can I get online?’ We’ve got a whole range of connectible devices now, but until we find that connection, we can’t get our online fix. Here are a few resources that will help. I started my search with this list of free Wi-Fi spots in Florida (thanks, Hilda Mitrani). Florida is one of my favorite vacation destinations. But since not everyone’s going there this summer, I thought I’d find a few more.

gWiFi.net is a Google Maps mashup that helps you identify free Wi-Fi hotspots near your current location when you input a street name, city or zip code. With almost a quarter of a million searches so far, it looks like a useful tool. Open Wi-Fit Spots does the same job and also makes a number of guides available, so it’s a good resource. JiWire has been around for a while and is regularly updated. At the time of writing, the site was tracking  562,173 free and paid Wi-Fi locations in 142 countries.

Aside from those resources, a couple of bloggers have outlined useful guides to finding free hotspots. Gina Trapani has published The Definitive Guide to Finding Free Wi-Fi on Lifehacker, while Deb Ng’s Kommein includes the more recent Where to Find Free WiFi Hotspots When You’re On the Road. Good luck!

Google+ (or Google Plus) has been in the social media news for the past couple of weeks. As a lover of shiny, new web stuff, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. I liked it immediately and there are a couple of things that have made my life easier as a travel blogger.

1. Sparks

This is where Google lets you track your interests. It’s similar to having a saved search in Twitter, but infinitely more user-friendly. I set up searches for airport parking, travel news and business travel and found some inspiration for blog posts that had eluded me via the usual channels.  That was a definite win.

2. Circles

Circles are like friend lists, but better. You can put people into circles according to how you want to segment them. People can be in more than one circle, too. And when you share things, you can share them only with the people who will be interested, rather than with everyone. You can even share with a single person (like a message). My initial impression is that it is much easier to follow a conversation in Google+ than in its closest rivals.

3. Hangouts

At the time of writing, I hadn’t used this yet, but it’s a great way to connect with up to 10 people using video or IM. Not only would this be good for business meetings (business profiles for G+ are on the horizon), but just to get together and talk about the things that interest you. You could have a regular travel bloggers’ hangout, for example.

Although initially my heart sank at the thought of yet another social network, after using it for a few days, I’m hooked. I’ve set up a circle with all my travel buddies in it (or as many as I’ve found so far.) I’m finding that I’m conversing with people whom I’ve followed at a distance and that’s terrific. If you’re on G+, then check me out here. (I’ll set up a business profile for Park Ride Fly USA as soon as they become available.) How have you found it so far?