The distances are relative to a blue marker on the map, which you can drag to your current location. For me, it was in the UK and completely hidden by one of the boxes. I just happened to notice it during the refresh after manipulating the map.
Hmm. You are only supposed to add pictures for new places. What happens when the first picture added along with a new place is beautiful, but much more beautiful photos exist? Worse yet, what if more representative photos exist?
E.g. arguably Mont Saint-Michel is a good candidate (in a similar vein as Mdina/Malta). I've got a nice, prototypical photo of Mont Saint-Michel, but I'm sure much, much better photos would be added -- the light was only okay, there are people in the photo, my camera back then wasn't the greatest. I've also got an image from within/on top of Mont Saint-Michel, which is also nice, but arguably the photo chosen to represent Mont Saint-Michel should be the classic "long shot" of the entire mountain/city/church.
In the spirit of the site itself, maybe a community process could manage existing places. E.g. a regular contest/vote for a better photo or simply a wiki. And of course these are issues that only crop up when and if the site takes off, so they don't need to be solved for the first iteration. Although it does pose a problem even now, since I feel apprehensive about adding any of my images since I don't want to prevent anybody else from adding theirs!
Heh, good thing I didn't add my Mont Saint-Michel photo, since it doesn't remotely compare to the one someone added in the intervening 8 hours: http://mostbeautifulplaces.org/item/5291532
Too bad the images aren't available in a higher res, btw.
I just found a place I'd like to visit. I saw "Valley of the Ten Peaks" in Canada. I visited Lake Louise on a road trip, but did not make it up to Moraine Lake. This makes me want to go back.
How will you keep the map from getting too crowded?
The social media bar is interfering somehow on
chrome 21.0.1157.0 (Developer Build 139621 Windows)
(with plugins set to click enable) and 1024*768 screen on xp.
Mainly, all the page under the bar is blank. this affects where the overview map thinks the center is, when you double click to zoom in. also, made the individual site pages uselessly narrow.
edit: deleting this node "<div id="share_btns" class="panel">" makes it usable.
it is different in many terms like mostbeautifulplaces.org focuses on the true beauty of that place, that's it. Also it is crowd-sourced, meaning that any one from all over the world can help discover great places on earth.
I agree. I think a transparent box with just the name would be great, and then when you mouseover/click, it would open a tooltip similar to PadMapper. Right now the distance and thumbnail don't really add much to the initial tooltip.
It would be great if each location had several pictures, and info on how to travel there & other nearby attractions. For instance, maybe it could open a link to HipMunk with the nearest airport already filled in, or it could just tell you airline prices directly. Do that, add a few hundred more locations, and this would actually be a really really cool site.
I just added two new places (Niagara Falls and Yosemite Falls). I'm hoping for this to catch on, that way It can help me plan my US-West_Coast trip in a few months :D
You have badlands national park located near Minneapolis MN. I don't know if this was meant to be a joke or not but you're off by several hundred miles.
Yeah all the content is from Wikipedia. Some very first places were not attributed properly, the newest ones are. We'll fix them soon. Thanks for the feedback.
What makes a place beautiful? Is it the location or the scenery? If it is the former than your website design should is spot on. If the latter than you should get rid of the map as the helm and show users a beautiful grid of images with location info at the bottom.
I bet both location and scenery are important as you'll consider where to visit first. Wouldn't it great to know somewhere is very beautiful and just close to you ? It is also very helpful when you travel as you don't want to miss any beautiful places near your destinations.
Also, there's a distance underneath the link, but I have no idea what it means nor how to change it.