Lonely Planet’s Trippy was featured last year as part of the Google Wave preview launch. Since then we’ve been collaborating with some of the Googlers to produce Lonely Planet’s Trippy for iGoogle, Android and for mobile browsers. The new expanded Trippy services provide you and your friends with collaborative trip planning tools that are available wherever you are.

Organise your trip items, view them on the map, and then refine them into days – creating the ultimate trip itinerary. Share your trip with friends and family, so Mum can vote for the sculpture museum, and the kids can vote for the gelati shop. The itinerary and feedback are then shared dynamically between iGoogle and the mobile Trippy app. Information from Lonely Planet about each item on your list is always at your fingertips, making the possibilities endless!

We got to play with some great tech while putting this together and it was a real treat to knock ideas around with the Googlers.

So here’s the Trippy Tech Recipe

• Hosting: App Engine
• Search: Google
• Recommendations: Lonely Planet Content API
• iGoogle app: OpenSocial
• Itinerary format and export: KML

You can find more Trippy information over at http://www.lonelyplanet.com/mobile/google.

And it doesn’t end here. Trippy is available under a open source licence through a strategic partnership between Google employee volunteers and Lonely Planet. Google posted about Lonely Planet’s Trippy and the Gulliver open source project earlier today. The open source project is available at http://code.google.com/p/gulliver-app/.

Happy trails!

This has been put aside for a small cross-functional team to allow us to do some prototyping for applications intended for a limited set of users.  Without saying too much about the project, this has allowed us to experiment with some new (draft) HTML5 features such as LocalStorage and Offline Application Using Manifest.  The core use-case is to allow the user to take data offline (i.e. disconnect from the internet after browsing to the given web page or web application) and continue to use the system. The key benefit with the HML5 features is that it allowed us to build an application that will work (with some minor tweaks) on a PC, Mac, Nokia handset, iPhone, iPad, Android handset – in fact pretty much any device which supports an HTML5 browser!  Any Developer who has had to maintain a suite of native applications which work on Linux, Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android, etc will be as excited as we are.

It is early days, however we are learning a lot about the target user and having heaps of fun building prototypes with some help from the magic of Ruby on Rails and jQuery.

It’s now time for us to take a step back and examine what we’ve achieved, and what we need to do next – in particular we need to examine some of the bugs which members of the programme have highlighted, and we need to figure out how we move the programme out of beta. To help achieve that goal, we’re putting new sign-ups on hold.

We currently have over 500 bloggers in the system and together they have posted over 11,000 articles. Now we need to stop for a moment and fix the outstanding issues before we can move on.

I’ll post here when we’re ready to open sign-up once again.

Nominations will open within the next month before voting and a live event announcing the winners shortly after…. keep your eyes here and on @lplabs on twitter for up to date information as it’s announced

by Julian Nikadie

It has always irked me that we have air conditioners running in the Lonely Planet server room 24 hours a day, every day of the year – even when we’re running heaters to warm the rest of the building. Such a waste of energy.

The need to redesign the server room to allow us to host some critical services gave us the opportunity to consider alternatives.

Wouldn’t it make sense to run the air conditioners only in Melbourne’s summer months? Could we vent the hot air from the server room to the rest of the building in Winter?

The reactions from the vendors we discussed our plans with ranged from a puzzled “Now, why would you want to do that?” to enthusiasm.

Inevitably there was the guy who nodded, said it seemed logical, and that he’d submit a proposal to us … that proposal was not only about six times what the budget would allow, it was a totally traditional, isolated server room that would require the air conditioners to run 24 hours a day – with no comment at all about the variation from what we’d discussed, and he seemed genuinely surprised that we didn’t respond immediately with a purchase order!

One of the enthusiastic vendors really latched on to the “waste of energy” comment we made while discussing why we didn’t want to simply increase the amount of cooling we had in the room.

“Ah! We’ve got just what you’re after … ”  [shuffle through brochures] “… here’s a new system that’s a twist on evaporative cooling – it uses less power to cool the room!”. Now, using less power to cool the server room was certainly better than our current system, but wasn’t it simply a more efficient way of wasting energy?

We wanted to use that energy to heat the building. He couldn’t help us there.

And then came  Anbro. Recommended by one of the vendors we were considering for the supply of a generator, Anbro was described as willing to listen and to consider offbeat ideas.

They came as a swarm. It seemed like there were a dozen fluoro-vested guys buzzing around discussing every aspect of the current systems (both within the server room and in the rest of the building). They had Bob running all over the place collecting plans and ladders. They were keen. They hadn’t done anything like this before, but it was logical, simple, and everyone should be doing it!

When their Warm Air Redirection System (WARS) proposal appeared in my email,  I skipped to the dollars part  (having been burned by the earlier pseudo-green proposal),… it couldn’t be right, it was not only less expensive than the pseudo-green proposal it was the best value of all of the proposals we’d received.

As I read the rest of the document (with that FGTH tune going through my head every time I saw the WARS abbreviation) it dawned on me … not only would this system save money through cheaper on-going running costs (since all of the other solutions had to install extra cooling to provide redundancy against the failure of a single air conditioner) – this proposal needed to provide sufficient cooling (for summertime), but the air conditioning and WARS could be used to back each other up. The fans, filters, ducts, vents, dampers and control circuits that would constitute the WARS were less expensive than providing a redundant air conditioner!

Why doesn’t everyone do this? Less expensive to install, less expensive to run, and Green! So, while war is good for “absolutely nothing”, WARS is proven greatness.

I made it up to Canberra for GovHack and had an incredibly inspiring time – we heard from Dr Nicholas Gruen (chair Gov Internet 2.0 task force) on the reasons Government were engaging in this area, we heard from John Allsopp (organiser) about the reasons for running the event and how he’d managed to pull it all together in just 3 weeks – seriously amazing.

I was lucky enough to be asked to deliver the keynote – I preached – I used the words piffle and tosh and I said something about this being an important inflection point in history, where we, the geeks, had for the first time the power to actually change the world – and that we can do it without throwing stools through starbucks windows (however tempting that may be). I talked about the fact the government were in the room with us giving us the data – that they were positively encouraging us to take it and use it to better inform the electorate – how bloody impressive is that? So we mustn’t sit here and play, we need to change the world.

They did it – the winners were an amazing gang who’d not met before the event but got together and built one of the most disruptive ideas I’ve ever seen… image a world in which you could easily see and understand the links between lobbying companies, companies bidding for work and government departments…. it would make government types squirm right? It did. Lobby Clue took the main prize – there were some really impressive builds from the rest of the group that you can see over on the wiki.

Move on a week and we’re back in Melbourne at the joint Lonely Planet / GovHack hack day – called MelHack. Phew…. first external hack day I’ve run since Over The Air in London a few months ago and I’d already forgotten how much work is involved in keeping a group of about 30 people fed, watered, inspired and cool in a building that’s air-con is playing up.

Melbourne is a cool town. It’s full of the types of people that like to go to interesting events like Trampoline. But this was the first external event I’d run here, and whilst in London I’m confident enough to stick my neck out and say we’ll comfortably get 400+ people to a hack day given the budget and space – I really wasn’t sure how it was going to fly here. We didn’t have a mass of space – we ran the event at the Lonely Planet HQ in footscray – and we certainly didn’t have a massive budget – so I concentrated on quality rather than size…. and boy did we get that. Over 50 people came through the door over the weekend and 12 ideas were presented by both staff and external devs. The quality of the people and ideas was massive.

The winners built a day trip generator using Lonely Planet POI (Point of Information) data. The application is live and working – but it does tend to struggle at the moment as it’s using the anon LP API access which is heavily throttled…. but when that’s fixed it’s stunning…. all the other ideas are listed over on the wiki – and are well worth a read and a play. The presentations are also worth a watch and they’re up on YouTube now.

I’ve been asked a lot here in Oz how you organise one of these events and if it’s only certain companies that can run them – not true. Hack Days are a lot of work, but easy enough if you think about the logistics in advance and you remember one thing above all others…. it’s all about the developers. Ross Hill took a short video interview with me talking about this very point – and if you’re interested in gettting your own hack day off the ground it might be worth a watch.

The Hack Day will run out of Lonely Planet’s HQ in Footscray, and GovHack will be bringing along all of it’s data, it’s knowledge, and will be running a series of workshops and classes on how to get into that data.

We’ll be announcing the schedule of talks soon, but at the moment it’s a combination of Lonely Planet’s APIs, Open Social, Gov data and some pure inspiration – if you’ve got a burning desire to talk about something that rocks, drop us a note and we’ll add you to the list…. We’ll also be keeping a few sessions free in a unconference style.

Saturday morning will be made up of talks, both inspiring and educational – but not necessarily at the same time. Then at 2pm we’ll start the 24 hour hack before presenting back to everyone on the Sunday afternoon – the big prize from Lonely Planet? Well you’ll have to come to find out but it takes 20 boxes to remove it all and you’ll not be able to carry it with you when you leave….

More news about something funky happening on Saturday night later this week… We’ll also be letting you know about the shuttle bus we’ll run from the CBD over to footscray on the mornings of the event.

So, before the places run out (there’s less than 15 left) – register now for the Melbourne Hack Day.

(in other news Lonely Planet are sending a team to the Canberra Hack Day this weekend (30th & 31st) – see you there)

Any sufficiently large code base will have some ugly parts in it.  Over time design decisions change.  Team members come and go.  SOAP doesn’t work out.  Yes, we all know the parts of a system that nobody wants to touch.

So, once a week, for 30 minutes all developers at Lonely Planet join a Mob that will stop at nothing before the nastiest section of code we can find is refactored, cleaned up or otherwise brought to submission.  The sessions are informal but indiscriminate – no part of the system is untouchable.  No blame is assigned, the only goal is to make the code base easier to work with.

Apart from having a cleaner code base Mob Refactoring has some other important benefits for us.  It helps to spread design (or “architecture” if you must) decisions across the team and solidifies shared practices.  Developers are exposed to parts of the system they wouldn’t otherwise touch and develop more confidence to change code to serve our business goals.

Join the teams responsible for the development of lonelyplanet.com, the Lonely Planet mobile apps and the new Lonely Planet Open Social Platform for the very first Lonely Planet Hack Day.

Fresh on the heels of a massively successful mobile hack day in London (http://overtheair.org), and our own internal hack day (see the photos and the video) we invite you to come to the Lonely Planet headquarters based in Footscray in Melbourne to spend 48 hours playing with our new API, our new Open Social platform and our rather funky content, images and maps.

This is the first time Lonely Planet has run a Hack Day here in Australia, and we believe the developers of Australia can teach the rest of the world a trick or two.

The event starts at 10am Saturday morning with a series of talks from developers on Open Social (beginner and expert sessions) and our APIs, there’ll also be space for unconference style talks and once you’ve signed up we’ll send you details of the event wiki where you can book a slot and see what others are talking about.

Saturday at 1pm 24 hours of hacking starts – right through the night at our HQ with a few hours break for a mystery event at 7pm until 10pm before heading back and burning the midnight oil (note: you’re not allowed to burn oil at the LP HQ, I’ll get told off).

Sunday at 1pm the presentations start – you’ll get 90 seconds each to present to your peers and the winners have some pretty decent prizes – not to mention all the free beer, coke and pizza on hand through-out the event.

So sign up now – there’s limited spaces for this first event – so please only do take a place if you know you can come – if you sign up and then can’t come please do let us know – matthew.cashmore@lonleyplanet.com

Below are highlights of the changes introduced, and here’s a video demo of the changes.

A big thank you to our development team who have worked for the past 3 iterations (6 weeks) on this functionality. It was a complex task and covered some tricky parts across our website (user registration/sign on / profiles) and some even trickier challenges wrestling with Facebook’s API.

Here’s a roll call of some to the significant changes we made to lonelyplanet.com

• New and existing users can connect their Lonely Planet account with their Facebook account at sign in and from within their profile management screens.
• When connected with Facebook anything they do in Thorn Tree or groups will be pushed out to be visible on Facebook to your network. Like this!

• Users registering with Lonely Planet the original way now have an option to opt in to our Comet and special offers newsletters. This used to be a separate form – since combining these we have seen a distinct uplift in Newsletter sign ups.
• We now have pagination in our Blogs we Like pages, to accommodate the ever growing content from our equally growing community of bloggers.
• We added links from the global footer to a ‘Follow Us’ page – promoting our Flickr, Twitter and Facebook streams.

Cheers
Katie
Global Website Manager