Where Will The Hitchlog Go?
I am sitting in one of Kathmandu’s rooftops, logged into the wifi and I am writing the first blog post of the Hitchlog.
Namaste!
My name is Florian and I created the Hitchlog in January 2011 with the idea to create an application which logs my Hitchhiking experiences. Later on it should analyze that data and print out information about my experience.
If I counted all the rides that I had in all those countries, how many kilometers did I hitchhike? In which places did i wait longest, in which shortest? Which were the craziest rides, which were the most interesting? If I compared my positive and my negative experiences, what would the ratio look like?
I adapted that website so that everyone could use it and now the Hitchlog runs for over one year and it reached a state where it is *somewhat* presentable to a larger audiance. I am saying somewhat because there are alot of things which are yet to improve.
I continued to develop the Hitchlog while I was travelling from Europe to Asia via Turkey and Iran by hitchhiking, which wasn’t always easy. My Macbook Pro broke in September in Turkey and I bought a new one in November in India. The slow internet connections and policy restrictions made it difficult and sometimes pretty frustating to get something done.
Where is the Hitchlog now?
The Hitchlog is progressing:
During the last five months I added several things:
- Many little things added to the UI
- A random slideshow of pictures on the homepage
- You can comment on Trips and start a discussion.
- You can send messages to other Hitchlog members.
- A better search interface
- A ride has an experience (defaults to positive):
- extremely positive
- positive
- neutral
- negative
- extremely negative
- Logging trips is now more intuitive and easier
- Internationalization: support for more languages (german, spanish, french, etc…)
The Hitchlog is still *in Beta* status. Sometimes the map is inaccurate and doesn’t show the right information. The inaccuracy of the Hitchlog needs to be addressed as accuracy is badly needed for getting true data. Sometimes you may come accross some bugs, which is unfortunate but in beta status unavoidable.
Where will the Hitchlog go?
I would like to see the Hitchlog acting as a place where people
- ask questions and get them answered,
- find Hitchhiking partners for trips
- find out statistical information about hitchhiking
Features that are yet to be implemented:
- Charts: Pies, Graphs, Countrymaps
- A country-chart displaying the number of trips in all the countries
- Piecharts comparing positive against negative experiences
- Timescales wich show the time of the hitchhiked trip
- and many more
- A nice User Interface:
Things could look much nicer and more intuitive. Unfortunately I am not the best UI designer and not an expert with HTML5 and CSS3. - Hitchparters:
- Search for hitchhikers in your surrounding
- Search and request for a hitchhiking partner to plan a trip
Developing the Hitchlog on my own, takes a lot of time and to get things done quicker, I need help. Not just from people entering data, I need help from developers devoting some of their time to develop this page. I will try to do my best, but doing all this while traveling, the progress is slow. I just came back from a two weeks trek in the Langtang mountains in Nepal and all this time nothing happened. Any help is deeply appreciated.
If you happen to be that developer who would like to shape a feature of the Hitchlog, please contact me:
florian@hitchlog.com
Javascript, Ruby, HTML5 and CSS3 ninjas wanted.
The application is available on Github
Just pick up a task on Pivotaltracker page from Hitchlog and start hacking.
How Can You Help If You Are Not Technicaly Skilled?
If you speak another language other than English, please help me to translate the hitchlog in a different language. This is very easy, you just need to translate keys and believe it or not, it’s fun too. Just drop a line to florian@hitchlog.com and I will set you up.
Be happy :) Happy Hitchiking, Florian
