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

It is a fairly small batch we can announce this time as the team has been working for 4 weeks on functionality for the following fortnight’s release. So stay tuned…

Below are highlights of the changes we introduced this time:

• We made it easier for users to navigate from a thorn tree post to a Thorn Tree user’s profile page. By just clicking on the poster’s username that sits with their post and selecting ‘view profile’. Thorn tree users have wanted this for some time, so it is a happy moment when we finally get these small improvements out to the user. This should also improve traffic to our new profile pages as it makes them easier to discover. It also complements the work we are currently doing (but is not yet live) to show a thorn tree activity stream on the user’s Profile page, alongside their groups activity.
• For Trip Planner users we fixed a bug – so now if you print your trip the POI details associated with your trip will also print. We also added the ability for a sponsor to display their logo within trip planner. First campaign using this is the MasterCard campaign in the US.
• For Lonely Planet blogs we fixed a bug so that users wanting to comment on a blog post can now sign in directly from the blog post to do so.

I will try and keep these brief and keep them coming each fortnight.

Cheers
Katie Marcar
Global Website Manager

You may not know that we release improvements to our website every 2 weeks, and I would like to share these changes with you each fortnight.

Below are highlights of what we introduced yesterday, and here’s a video demo of the changes by Matthew Cashmore.

You can now add comments to articles posted on the site. Take the Tour De France article as an example. Cycle freaks it’s time to be heard! Don’t forget to register with lonelyplanet.com in order to post a comment.

If you are already a Lonely Planet member you will be happy to hear that you can now pimp your profile further.

• Last release we provided the ability to upload your own profile picture. Like this!
• This release we have included the ability to embed images into your profile as well as express yourself though some simple styling tags. Like this…

Users of our Groups area – launched last fortnight – will be pleased to hear we have already responded to user feedback and have added the ability for group members to share links within their posts.

We have introduced a the Travel Insurance Widget on the right hand side of the practical information pages, allowing users to get an insurance quote from our partner in one click.

Finally, a little known section of our site, Mapshells (eg map of Italy), has undergone some changes to improve the overall product, with a view to converting the significant traffic from this area into page views to parts of the site we can better commercialise (eg: Shop via sales and Destinations via advertising). You can see these new links to the interactive map, destination photos and the shop on the right hand side of the map of Italy page.

The good news is that the arduous back-end system that allowed us to add blogs has been replaced by a new automated sign-up that runs from the new and rather funky profiles on lonelyplanet.com - we’ve also been building out the documentation on the BlogSherpa Wiki - and, well…. we think it’s ready for the big time.

Adding your blog to the BlogSherpa program is easy - first, log into lonelyplanet.com (if you’ve not got an account register here). Once logged in hit your name on the top right hand side of the screen and click ‘my travel blogs’ in the list of links under you new avatar - then just hit ‘new blog’ and enter the details. Make sure you click the ‘Yes, please consider my blog for ”Blogs We Like” check box and give us your Google Adsense ID and you’re good to go. (While you’re there you may want to add an avatar or play with some of the other new stuff).

We’ll review the applications and let you know within 7 days if you’re accepted.

I’m really proud of what we’ve done with BlogSherpa and I hope you’ll enjoy using it - together I think we can build a pretty impressive collection of the worlds best travel blogs - and importantly share our traffic and revenue with you.

If you’d like a step-through of exactly how to add your blog, I’ve recorded this short video.