blog.triptouch

Several years ago, travel communities were a huge promise. Many websites tried to give travelers what they want – a place to share their experiences, find new travel mates, upload their photos, and a place to ask questions and get information about their planned trips. Examples for travel communities include WAYN, TripUp, TravBuddy and RealTravel.

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Randomly surfing the web I noticed a strange message instead of the Tripup homepage: ” Tripup is gone, sorry. Maybe you can use Facebook instead, it’s very popular.”

It’s sad to see a website gone, or “deadpooled“- knowing the effort and energy it needs to build it.

I found Tripup (or as it was called then TripMates) when I started to work on our project. I quite liked the site and considered it as a fair competitor. Then I read that it was acquired by sidestep, we saw it as a good sign- a well established travel site acquires a travel community.

The problem probably was that tripup never got traction and traffic, and Sidestep merger to Kayak caused changes in the focus (as Tim in the BOOT hints).

So we say to Tripup users: Facebook is very popular indeed, but it’s not a travel tool. Try triptouch.com and you’ll find here most of the features you used to have in tripup.

And if someone from Tripup reads this, why don’t you contact us? Maybe we can think of a way to help your community.

A few people have asked me about TripTouch - what tools do we use to write the web site? So here’s a short list, I hope I didn’t forget anything -

• Our server is running Apache, on Linux.
• For server-side scripting we use PHP. We use Eclipse to do most of the code editing. Client-Side is obviously done with Javascript. We use several 3rd party libraries (both for PHP and JS). We also use scriptaculous for JS effects and such.
• The database is MySQL. We use both phpMyAdmin and MySQL tools to admin the DB, on the production site and on the test servers and local DBs for development.
• When we installed everything on our desktop computers we used WAMP which is a great timeserver if you want to install Apache, MySQL and PHP.
• For version (source) control we use SVN.
• For bug tracking we use Mantis - although to be honest we don’t use it too much. Most of the bugs are written on the white-board in the R&D room…

I think that pretty much sums it all up. Obviously there are many applications we use as well (GIMP, FileZilla, Thunderbird, FireFox with Firebug, IE + IE Developer toolbar, opera, safari, PuTTy and more).