TravelStash is all about geotagging your blog posts.  When you travel somewhere and want to blog about it, TravelStash is the perfect tool for you.

However, there is an edge-case that we hadn’t considered when we first created TravelStash and that is - what if you don’t have anything you desperately want to say about a particular place you visited or passed through, but you still want people to know that you were there?

Samuel Hagler from RideForTheTrees.com and also TravelStash - Ride For The Trees realized that this was a limitation of TravelStash and so let us know.  He thought it would be a useful feature particularly for someone like himself who is riding a bicycle over long distances.  He wanted to show the world exactly where he’d ridden but didn’t want to write a whole article about every corner he’d turned.

This was a feature that had actually crossed our minds a little while back but at the time it didn’t seem like something we really needed.  That and we thought omg, this is gonna be a tough one to solve.

And boy was it a tough one to solve!  We’ve just spent the last few weeks working on this functionality on and off (bear in mind we do both have full time jobs and only have time to work on TravelStash after-hours) and we have finally finished.  There may still be bugs with it and I can already see some obvious enhancements we can make, but for now, this should suffice.

So how does it work?  Basically instead of adding a blog post complete with entry, extract and photos, you can now add a group of pins to your trip.  A group of pins is an ordered list of pins that is grouped and defined by a date - that is they all belong together and occur on the same date.  The reason we decided to group pins together is because we figured if you wanted to plot your route between two points then you would probably want to place more than one pin at a time.

Pins will not appear in your list of ‘blogs’, nor will they appear on the front page of TravelStash.  Pins do not have their own url.  Pins will only appear on the map and will form a part of the line that represents the route you’ve taken on your trip.

The user interface for adding and editing groups of pins is quite elegant, if I do say so myself.  It is all done through a map interface in the admin section of TravelStash.  You start off by selecting a trip that you want to add the pins to.  Then you add a title for your pin group.  And then you give your pin group a date - which is super important because as I mentioned before, this dictates where and how the pins will be drawn in relation to existing pins in your trip.

Once you’ve done all that, you can start adding pins to your group.  This is quite simply done by clicking on the map.  A single click on the map will draw a pin and add a white box under the map showing the pin’s longitude and latitude.  This box also allows you to give the pin a title of it’s own.  When you add more than one pin, a line will be drawn between the pins showing the order in which the pins will be saved and eventually drawn on your map.  You can re-order the pins by dragging the white boxes that represent the pins up or down in the list below the map.  The pins will be re-drawn dynamically when you do this so you can see what the effect of your actions has been.

To delete a pin from your pin group, you simply click on the pin on the map.  And to move a pin you just drag it across to somewhere else.  And if you want more control over the exact coordinates of a pin, you can edit the longitude and latitude in the textboxes provided.  Simple huh?

We certainly hope that users like Samuel will find this new functionality really useful and intuitive to use.