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Show HN: Trott.in, Twitter style character limit for beautiful travel blogs

13 points by aidanlister ↗ HN
Hey Hacker News,

Myself and another nomad have been working on this for a few years. It's a travel blog that aims to make it easier to write (and read) by limiting you to one photo and 350 characters per day.

The first part was easy (making it work for us), the second part took a lot longer (adding all the polish to make it usable).

Mostly it's a passion project borne out of lack of alternatives. If we were going to monetise it would probably be by adding a feature to turn posts (trots) into postcards, and make a small markup over a printing API like lob.com. Probably not a huge market, but I know my family / friends would love a postcard every now and then.

I'd love some feedback on the homepage ... http://www.trott.in/

Here's a big trip that we did recently: http://www.trott.in/trips/unomas-all-the-way-down

If anyone is out there doing a big trip, or has a trip that they want to put online to share ... I'd love you to take trott.in for a spin and let me know what you think.

6 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 28.7 ms ] thread
sebkomianos
I wanted to build something similar, will definitely give it a try! Are you actually thinking of monetising/keep working on it?
aidanlister
We've been working on it for two years and have invested a lot of time recording our own trips on it, so it's not going anywhere!

If we do monetise it, it will be around selling products (like postcards, or travel gear we really like), rather than the usual suspects like advertising.

kevinsimper
It looks cool, it is always awesome to read other peoples, especially your own friends travel!

But i think it is too much to invent a new word (trott), which is essentially a "short blogpost".

You think about supporting to pull in other social media accounts into one page, because I don't think that you can beat the ease of publishing a tweet. There is tweet clients for every client!

But cool if you could automaticly send postcards to your older family members!

aidanlister
We liked the idea of making our own verb, always nice to have if it catches on!

We've experimented with a few different concepts in integrating social media, but it doesn't feel right using social media as a primary source -- the value of creating a trip as something that you can come back and look at later gets lost when it's mixed with all the noise on twitter / facebook.

We added the usual "share this on facebook" style sharing, but it wasn't used much. We'll keep experimenting with interaction patterns ... if anyone has any ideas on this let me know!

jreed91
hmmm, I would put more emphasis on the photo over the maps imagery. This seems like a great idea for an iOS or Android app, being able to track the trips entire location history.