Launching TravelFeed 2.0

Travelfeed is now 2.0! The moment you load Travelfeed.io now you will notice right away that it's prettier, faster, smoother and easier to use, both on desktop and mobile devices. The last two weeks have been extremely busy, while launching our crowdfunding campaign on @fundition, to cover some of our expenses, we were also working hard to improve and add features and to get rid of bugs which were nesting on TravelFeed.io. Let's dive right into this week's big announcements.

TravelFeed 2.0 - 15.000 Lines Of Code Changed

Yes, you read it correctly, we changed over 15,000 lines of code to improve TravelFeed. That is not since the launch of TravelFeed 1.0 in June, but just within the past two weeks! This is a lot of code written and tested, reinforcing that we're serious about pushing TravelFeed forward. Thanks to all the feedback and ideas we’ve been receiving, we're able to keep improving our platform constantly and drastically.

Now, don't wait any longer to check out 2.0 by visiting Travelfeed.io and see first hand all the new changes - the first thing you will notice is that when navigating, pages are now loading so much faster thanks to changing from pre-render to lazy render, this helps loading a page in no time. We also improved the lazy loading of images, and by the way, talking about images, we’ve moved to fast and reliable S3 storage to host images uploaded to TravelFeed and added an image resizer to automatically resize images over 1 MB before uploading. Say goodbye to upload problems and long waits when uploading!

Before 2.0, you could only update your profile via a Steemconnect link, but we now added profile edits via Steem Keychain and EasyLogin, taking advantage of a new Blockchain operation introduced in HF21. Also, we added beautiful background images in case TravelFeed throws an error page, warns you when you're leaving the platform via an external link or when you're signing up via EasySignUp.

There are so many great articles on TravelFeed.io, well worth sharing to your social media accounts. We enhanced the share icons for the mains social media websites, also added Reddit, plus you can now easily copy links to your clipboard and we added a resteem function as well. And talking of Reddit, we just launched our TravelFeedio subreddit, come and join us!

A big thank you to all of our users and supporters. Without your ideas and constant feedback we wouldn't be able to move forward like this. Girls and guys, you're AWESOME!

TravelFeed goes mobile

Using TravelFeed on a mobile device has massively improved as well. Instead of a simple, mobile-optimized site, TravelFeed is a progressive web app, using an upcoming technology that is often said to replace many native apps by 2020. On Android, you get a prompt allowing you add TravelFeed to your home screen, it is then launched in full screen. TravelFeed on mobile now feels like a native app, we added a swipeable menu drawer and header icon buttons, allowing you to bookmark and share articles, follow users, navigate to the previous page and use the search function. We also made many improvements to our UI that especially look great on mobile.

TravelFeed Steemfest Presentation And Meetups In Thailand

As a reminder, TravelFeed.io will be presented by @jpphotography along with @for91days and @worldcapture during Steemfest. We’ll introduce our platform, share our path from the beginning up to where we are now and contemplate what we have in store for the future. Once we know what speaking slot is assigned to us, you're going to be the first one to find out.

Meetups Thailand

But it’s not just that! We now have two confirmed TravelFeed meetups, one on November 11th at a cool rooftop bar in Bangkok and the other, on November 15th, is part of the Nomads Cafe weekly meetup in Chiang Mai, where we were invited to speak to their community. We're at the moment in the process to set up one more event in Chiang Mai - to sum a total of 3 exclusive get togethers. We want to meet our users and also introduce TravelFeed.io to travellers, travel bloggers and digital nomads outside of the Steem Blockchain and to people who are playing with the idea to start their own travel blog. Of course, existing TravelFeed users are more than welcome to join!

Steemfest Ticket Giveaway Leaderboard

Things are heating up! There is still some time to increase your chance to win this giveaway (sponsored by @blocktrades and @anomadsoul), you’ve got a little bit more than 2 weeks to earn raffle tickets and walk away with the Steemfest Admission plus accommodation. So don't miss out on that chance! Not sure how to participate? Please read about the giveaway rules here.

The current top 5 leaderboard:

1. @invisusmundi with 56 raffle tickets
2. @oheyo with 52 raffle tickets
3. @waybeyondpadthai with 49 raffle tickets
4. @joythewanderer with 35 raffle tickets
5. @rayshiuimages with 16 raffle tickets

100 Steem Travel Writing Contest

We're now on the 4th season (rules via the link) of the travel writing contest organized by @invisusmundi, it's easy to participate and the prizes are well worth your time, last day to participate is October 13th:

1st place: 100 Steem
2nd place: 25 Steem
3rd place: 15 Steem
4th - 5th place: 5 Steem
6th - 7th place: 3K lifestyle tokens delegation for 1 month

You can submit your travel articles via this contest page.

TravelFeed 2.0 Changelog

New Features and major improvements

• Significant performance improvements by switching from prerender to lazy render, by passing existing information to new components and by adding more pages. Many components had to be updated and rewritten in the progress (better code)
• Improve mobile usability:
  • Add icon buttons to header depending on page: Expand menu, open search, follow author, share post, bookmark post, back
  • Add swpipable drawer on TravelFeed
  • Break card actions into two lines (vote button and tags)
  • Better offline handling/messages (PWA)
• Enable parsing pull-left and pull-right - thanks @justinparke and @fredrikaa for the suggestion
• Image upload to S3 (replace Cloudinary) with automated resizing for images over 1mb
• Enable profile update with Keychain and EasyLogin (instead of just Steemconnect). Known third-party problem: Profile avatar from https://steemitimages.com/u/user/avatar/ is currently retrieved from json_metadata, not from posting_json_metadata (steemit/imagehoster#113), so for now, profile avatars are not updated
• Scenic background images for some pages (Error, External link, EasySignUp)
• Improve share buttons: Colors, added Reddit, copy link and resteem
• Improve preview cards: Cut excerpt to 3 lines instead of 250 chars, increase card image height, allow all characters in excerpt

Bug fixes and minor improvements

• Various UI improvements: Rounded corners for posts and comments ("material v2"), improve font, improve paddings,..
• Improve image lazyload (preload larger images with a higher opacity)
• Fix badges not loading
• Update Steemconnect icon
• Fix blog not loading for authors without geotagged posts
• Fix editor notification hidden behind sidebar - thanks @nickyhavey for reporting
• Fetch profile from Steem API for faster updates (Hivemind has a weird delay)
• Fix markdown editor list preview font size
• Disable markdown editor synchScroll - thanks @zirochka for the suggestion
• Fix geocoder (API change)
• Exclude exact addresses from Geocoder query
• Prevent "Not logged in" message from appearing on Dashboard and Bookmarks page when refreshing (Render "login to view dashboard" on client only) - thanks @gabrielatravels for reporting
• Don't display travelfeed in post tags
• Fix problems with curator menus
• Fix json_metadata overwritten when editing a post
• Fix problem with Steemconnect that caused load loop when posting - thanks @gabrielatravels for reporting
• Fix blank page on logout
• Fix blank page when switching from TravelBlog to TravelFeed
• Add placeholder image to post parser instead of non-existent brokenimg.jpg
• Remove caching from bookmarked button
• Fix Permlink not saving in draft
• Remove or replace generic tags
• Fix dark mode rendering for some pages
• Fix non-js links not working due to double <a> elements

Content updates

• New join texts to make clearer for existing Steemians that they don't need to sign up for a new account
• Update founder mug shots
• Add Fundition campaign to support us
• Add Pinterest to SocialLinks
• Customize 'No posts found' messages depending on context

Full Changelog on Github

How to Get Involved?

Join the TravelFeed Community! We invite anyone who’s interested in travel to check out TravelFeed.io and to join our over 900-strong community on Discord. We’re also looking for one more curator to join our team.

We ❤️ Open Source: We are proud to make TravelFeed fully Open-Source, and support other communities on Steem who want to build on our code, which can be found on Github. We’re still looking for contributors who want to work with us on the future of TravelFeed. We’re in Beta and continuously improving the software, meaning that there are still some bugs. If you notice anything or have feedback for us, please don’t hesitate to contact us on our Discord, leave a comment or open a bug report on our Github!

Consider Delegating To Us

Your delegation not only supports the growth of this incredible project, but also helps the entire travel community on the Steem blockchain. Once we launch our token, the airdrop to delegators will be based on the amount of SteemPower delegated and your share of the total delegations for each day delegated. This means an advantage for early investors delegating now while our total delegations amount is only 128k SP: a number that we expect to be much higher in the near future. Our Steem Power is fully used for curation of the best TravelFeed posts and we provide temporary delegations of 15 SP to accounts created through us, to help with resource credits. Feel free to use the following links according to the amount you would like to delegate to @travelfeed:

100 SP | 250 SP | 500 SP | 1000 SP | 2500 SP | 5000 SP | 10000 SP | 15000 SP | 25000 SP | 50000 SP

And again, we'd like to thank every single delegator who believes and trusts in us. If TravelFeed becomes as successful as we are confident it will be, delegating to us is probably the investment with the highest ROI on Steem right now.

Winners of This Week's Round-up 

And with all this exciting news, we don't want to forget to highlight our three favorite submissions from this week. The rewards will go to the first three places as follows: 1st place - 14 STEEM, 2nd place - 7 STEEM and 3rd place - 3 STEEM.


The thumbnails are directly linked to the original posts. Please, click on the image and enjoy the read!

What do 45 well-dressed men and women riding motorbikes together have in common? That is the question I asked my self at 9 am when I jumped on the motor scooter I was using and rode over to 9 grains bakery in Hoi An. The bakery was the starting point for the First-ever The Distinguished Gentleman's Ride Hoi An 2019

Another fun place we visited was the abandoned hotel up the Igman mountains. The place was abandoned after the war and you can still see a lot of the damages. It was not far from the city but quite a climb up by bicycle. It took us about two hours to reach there in a sunny morning. Once we got there it was hard to miss the big concrete jungle (literally, you'll find out soon). We hid our bike behind some bushes, away from the main road just to be safe. No one else was there when we arrived so we had the entire place to ourselves.

Anafiotika is a tiny neighborhood of 45 houses on the Acropolis hill, made by construction workers that king Otto (yes we used to have a king!) had called to Athens from the island of Anafi. Literally built at night, without a building permit, are now preservable buildings and a landmark of Athens for more than 150 years!