Blogging Features
Journal Features
- Flexible creation process with unlimited journals containing unlimited entries.
- Multiple locations can be tagged to each journal entry.
- Each entry contains its own photo album and video gallery.
- Each journal contains a chronological map animating the route travelled.
- Journal cover photo can be defined by the journal owner.
- Content can be set as public or private and sharing permissions can be granted to designated people from the member’s address book.
Photo Gallery Features
- Unlimited photo uploads.
- Multiple upload tool compresses photos client-side to reduce bandwidth and storage requirements.
- Captions can be added to each photo.
- Photos can be arranged and ordered using drag and drop interface component.
Member Profiles
- Statistics panel contains countries and cities visited, entries created, photos uploaded and number of views by website users.
- Clickable profile map pinpoints all locations visited across all journals.
- Profile photo uploader and cropping tool.
- Profile text box for status updates or brief description.
Networking Features and Member Tools
- Journal comment system with pre-approval by journal owner prior to publishing. Integrated with comment spam filter.
- Members can connect to friends or bookmark interesting journals for future reference.
- Member address book with web mail import facility from all major web mail providers.
- Message centre enables members to send messages to each other. Members can also email pages to friends and send update emails whenever their blog has been updated.
- A member guestbook lets members see who has viewed each of their journals.
- A future trip calendar lets members add upcoming trips. For each location added, the member has the ability to select whether they would like to meet travel buddies and to appear in the travel buddy site search.
- Each member has their own RSS feed containing a list of recent site activity.
Site Search
- Site-wide free text content search - Provides excellent tool for researching future trips.
- Search by name - Allows people searches using first and/or last name combinations.
- Location search - Enables all journals matching specific locations to be listed by relevance.
- Search results are filtered using an algorithm which compares the entry title, text and associated locations to ensure relevancy.
- Search results includes content level indicators to improve relevancy and empty search results.
Mapping Features
- Location database contains more than 3.5 million world locations.
- Missing locations submitted by users and added to database.
- Location rating system lets users rate locations besed on a number of topics.
Administration Tools
Advertising
You have full control over the advertising you display throughout your website. You can manage contextual advertising placement and default advertisements for each region, targeting single or multiple locations for each advertisement added.
Statistics and Content
The control centre provides live updates on new members. You can view and browse new members and generate reports on member registrations between selected dates. You are also presented with all new content being created. This enables you to identify interesting members and content that you may want to feature on the homepage. You can view your member data and have access to a download feature which includes their names, email addresses and travel statistics for use in your marketing campaigns.
Featured Content Modules
The control centre provides modules that enable you to set members or journals to being featured. This will add the selected members or journals to the rotational list of featured content that appears on the website homepage as showcase examples.
Spam Moderation
Though comments require approval from the journal owner prior to being published, we take all precautions to prevent members being harassed by spammers and we monitor comments being made through the control centre. Any comment deemed inappropriate is immediately removed and the offending member de-activated if necessary.
Banning Members
In the event of members needing a new password or not being able to retrieve one, you can reset their passwords from the member settings page. Members who create inappropriate or offensive content can be de-activated and banned from the system.
Customisation and Integration
Total Customisation
The front-end user interface has been build using modern web standards, written in XHTML and CSS to allow re-branding to be carried out with relative ease and to enable us to offer you a fully customised look and feel as part of our commercial services.
The level of customisation we can provide is limitless. We offer commercial consultancy that extends as far as you need.
As part of our ongoing development we deploy updates and new features to all partner sites. If you have ideas for new features you’d like built specifically for your site, our team will be happy to build them. This is your platform and we’ll do our best to provide exactly what you need.
Seamless Integration
Our software runs as a stand-alone website with user authentication handled natively within the system. Should you need to integrate your social features with an existing system, chat to us and we'll work out a solution that seamlessly integrates your databases and user registrations into a single sign-on procedure.
Doing this ensures you can maintain a central repository for managing communication settings and personal account data.
Search Engine Optimisation
Our software is optimised for search engines with our showcase community, My Life of Travel, having over 150,000 pages of content indexed in Google and receiving over 25,000 organic Google referrals per month.
Our automatic sitemap feature ensures content pages are easily crawled by all major search engines and on-page optimisation ensures that content keywords receive full benefit when indexed.
Because content can be searched and browsed across partner websites, we have created a module which adds a no-follow tag to pages that are not created by your members. This means that your members can fully interact with members tagged to other partners but only you will receive SEO benefit from content created by members who join through your website.
Fully Managed and Hosted
We manage the daily maintenance of our own community through the admin centre. This involves adding new featured members and journals, moderating content to ensure only suitable content is added, and ensuring spammers are not harassing members through messages or journal comments. As such, we have the infrastructure to manage your community for you, reducing the need for overhead and staff on your side.
Our technical team are on hand 24/7 to ensure our websites are running smoothly. We employ industry standards in securing our databases and storing content. Each partner receives their own hosted deployment which is independently configurable and hosted on the domain or sub-domain of your choice from within our server rack.
By providing a fully hosted platform, we ensure strict security standards are implemented and that your data resides behind our firewall. It also ensures we can monitor performance and make any upgrade or scaling adjustments as your community grows.
Performance and Security
My Life of Travel is proven and stable and has been in operation in a production capacity for a full 2 years. The application is built in ASP.NET with industry standards and best practices used for the object-oriented design of the application.
Microsoft SQL Server is used as the data repository, an enterprise level relational database management system that scales beyond requirements.
The application has been designed with flexibility and extensibility in mind in regards to image storage. Images are stored on clusters of image servers within the network, enabling a vast amount of space to be offered to members. Client-side compression means large numbers of images can be uploaded while maintaining system performance.
Access to data is available via standard interfaces that are well defined and implement security requirements by default in order to minimise risk.