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I love traveling and program curious (but unuseful) things. From time ago I had the idea of creating a travel blog, but creating another account on WordPress.com for “just another travel blog” didn’t looked like the coolest option, so I had a better idea.
What about combining a simple content generation system like Jekyll, some web services a couple links, and a sunday afternoon? I wanted my page to have some specific things:
- Have a list of visited countries, show the flags, and have the number of visited cities for each countries.
- For each country, have a map of the different cities.
- For each city, have a map with the recomended places, and show them in a map.
The result of this idea is Trilo:
The home page is made by two sets of maps, a world scale, and an europe map. Both maps are created using Google Chart Tools.
The flags are obtained using a web service from a two digit code.
This country code will be used also as a category.
In the countries page, we can find the flag that we obtained before, a zoomed map of the cities and a link to the city page.
For each city, we can generate a static map with the Google Maps API from the city name and from recomendations. We also link with TripAdvicor and Wikipedia for more information.
As I wrote before, the system is based on Jekyll, a Ruby written system that allows us to generate static pages from templates, some code and a little bit of magic. It has been interesting for doing a simple mashup with something not related with computing.
The project is avaliable (and hosted) in http://rlbisbe.github.com/trilo/