
Show HN: Trott.in, Twitter style character limit for beautiful travel blogs - aidanlister
Hey Hacker News,<p>Myself and another nomad have been working on this for a few years. It&#x27;s a travel blog that aims to make it easier to write (and read) by limiting you to one photo and 350 characters per day.<p>The first part was easy (making it work for us), the second part took a lot longer (adding all the polish to make it usable).<p>Mostly it&#x27;s a passion project borne out of lack of alternatives. If we were going to monetise it would probably be by adding a feature to turn posts (trots) into postcards, and make a small markup over a printing API like lob.com. Probably not a huge market, but I know my family &#x2F; friends would love a postcard every now and then.<p>I&#x27;d love some feedback on the homepage ... 
http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trott.in&#x2F;<p>Here&#x27;s a big trip that we did recently:
http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trott.in&#x2F;trips&#x2F;unomas-all-the-way-down<p>If anyone is out there doing a big trip, or has a trip that they want to put online to share ... I&#x27;d love you to take trott.in for a spin and let me know what you think.
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kevinsimper
It looks cool, it is always awesome to read other peoples, especially your own
friends travel!

But i think it is too much to invent a new word (trott), which is essentially
a "short blogpost".

You think about supporting to pull in other social media accounts into one
page, because I don't think that you can beat the ease of publishing a tweet.
There is tweet clients for every client!

But cool if you could automaticly send postcards to your older family members!

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aidanlister
We liked the idea of making our own verb, always nice to have if it catches
on!

We've experimented with a few different concepts in integrating social media,
but it doesn't feel right using social media as a primary source -- the value
of creating a trip as something that you can come back and look at later gets
lost when it's mixed with all the noise on twitter / facebook.

We added the usual "share this on facebook" style sharing, but it wasn't used
much. We'll keep experimenting with interaction patterns ... if anyone has any
ideas on this let me know!

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ramnes
Funny: [https://github.com/ramnes/trotter](https://github.com/ramnes/trotter)

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sebkomianos
I wanted to build something similar, will definitely give it a try! Are you
actually thinking of monetising/keep working on it?

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aidanlister
We've been working on it for two years and have invested a lot of time
recording our own trips on it, so it's not going anywhere!

If we do monetise it, it will be around selling products (like postcards, or
travel gear we really like), rather than the usual suspects like advertising.

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jreed91
hmmm, I would put more emphasis on the photo over the maps imagery. This seems
like a great idea for an iOS or Android app, being able to track the trips
entire location history.

