Travel website mapping
The goal is to produce engaging maps of the places visited so as to enhance and support the stories. To give a pleasurable reading experience to the visitor as well as information. Interactive and responsive to content would also be welcobe.
A moving trace showing progress along a route would be ideal. I did achieve that for a while, and have this note elsewhere on this site. '... a map will appear which will run an animation of the route. It is currently under development and is a bit experimental. However, that now returns an Error page. The product was by www.animaps.com, but that also leads to a Error page'. Unfortunately, That is back on the wish list. Michael Palin programs have it, so there must be a way.
If the goal is to produce a travel map, lets look at one I prepared earlier.
An overview of our Iceland self drive holiday in 2003
This is prepared in Google My Maps and saved to Google Drive to make it shareable, and visible to you, the reader.
How to start
I start the process of mapping a trip by gathering together all of the hard evidence. Top ten items listed below.
- Booking receipt / invoice
- Flight tickets / boarding passes
- Passports
- Itinerary
- Hotel / Campsite bookings and receipts
- Maps of the journey, hopefully marked up
- Maps of the time
- Leaflets picked up on the way
- Guide books
- Other receipts / invoices / bookings
Timeline
Then I start to build a timeline.
Initially I would build the timeline with the aid of the Travel Data part of my website.
This was built using a Joomla add on called Fabrik. It was a very useful database application working within Joomla 3. However, when Joomla 4 arrived, which was a major re-build and re-structure, Fabrik could no longer function. You can read about the Travel data problems in my article of that name.
I downloaded all the data into csv files and then into Excel. My problem now is how to move forward as over a year after all stopped on the Fabrik front, they have now released a Joomla 4 version. I do understand the difficulties of a small company having to find investment to re-write its product to adapt for effectively a new platform, especially when your product is a free download.
One option is to recreate the travel data section of my website using Fabrik again. Another is to not publish that information and re-create the record function within Excel or Access. Either of the latter could produce the csv file which could be imported into ESRI Story Maps.
I think the conclusion is therefore to continue with the absence of the Travel Data on this website.
Anyway, I digress.
