Adding multi-stop trips
As I mentioned in the previous post, a lot of you have been asking for the ability to add ‘multi-stop’ trips, that is – trips where you’ll be hitting a number of destinations before you return home.
We’ve added this now, with a tweak to our ‘Add trip’ interface that I’ll illustrate below.
So, first of all – after clicking ‘add a trip’ on Dopplr, you see our new, slightly-tweaked ‘Add trip’ form:
You’ll notice that there’s a new link beneath the date field for the start of the trip – “Add another stop on this trip”
Clicking that does what it says on the tin, and gives you another destination field to put the next stop on your trip into.
You can click the “X” by the side of this new line of destination and starting date to get rid of it if you’ve added one-too-many stops in your excitement!
The more eagle-eyed amongst you will have already spotted that the dates advance on automatically by a day every stop you add to the trip. Of course you can manually alter these to reflect your itinerary.
If you enter a date by accident that is out of order, we’ll ask you to check and replace it with a date the same as or after the date of your previous stop.
Dopplr takes the causal violation of spacetime seriously…
Once you’re happy with the shape of your multi-stop trip, add it to Dopplr in the normal way by clicking “Add trip” – we’ll generate trip pages for each of the stops on your trip, but they will be connected together as ‘related trips’.
We’ll be adding more special formatting and functionality related to ‘related trips’ (!) in the near future.
A Dopplr user who might find this new feature very handy is Rebecca, the Skype Nomad
She’s travelling the world, and along with a bunch of other social tools, she’s using Dopplr to find coincidences with fellow travellers along the way. If you’re a Dopplr member you can find her at http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/skypenomad
Right – enough tasty sprinkles for now. Time for me to get back to plotting the next lot of goodness for you lovely people with MattB…
Remember, in the mean-time, if you’ve got thoughts on new stuff you’d like to see on Dopplr, or feedback for how we could improve it for you, zoom along to our forum on Get Satisfaction…
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Update, 22nd May 2008: We’ve had some feedback that Multi-stop trips are not displaying on Microsoft IE6 – this is unfortunately true.
After a lot of blood,sweat and tears we haven’t found a satisfactory way of implementing them on IE6, so we took the decision to disable the feature in that browser. I’m sure this is frustrating to many of you – it’s certainly very frustrating for us.
We realise lots of you don’t have the choice to change browser or upgrade, and as a result are stuck with IE6, so we’re going to do what we can to find a work-around for you – MJ
This is great. Your carbon calculator will be a lot more useful now that it doesn’t think my 20 city train trip constituted 20 separate trips from my home city!
Can I “convert” existing city trips to this new multi-hop format? Or do I have to go back and fix it manually. That would bum me out.
Making mental note to add some useful Dopplr tips about Whitstable (my home town), in the meantime seek out Birdies, JoJo’s, Wheelers, and the Sportsman for food, and the Neptune, East Quay and Ship Centurion for beverages.
Hi
I don’t seem to have the Add Another Stop on the trip link on my Add Trip tool :-(
Andrew
How can existing trips be connected as related trips?
Hi, theres no additional places to insert info as per your screenshots.
Not released functionality yet?
Hi Henrik – what browser are you using? We’ve have issues with this feature in IE6, so we’ve disabled it for users with that browser (see my update to the blog-post). Apologies if you’re affected by this.
Great feature… but editing existing trips would be a great compliment to this function.
Yay team \o/ ! This must have been about my most-wanted feature.
Any idea when I will be able to edit multi-trips? Right now I just get to edit the first bit. (Opera 9.5 beta, if that makes a difference).
chaals
Hi Dopplr Team,
great new feature, but it would be nice to have it also when editing existing trips. I’m using Firefox 2.0.14 on a Mac.
Best regards
Gregor
Sorry, but you forget a travel by motorcycle…. :D
boat would also be a nice one to have as choice of transportation.
with so many people going on cruises, and private boats all over the place, it’s somewhat strange that’s not available.
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There’s a bit of an oddity where it automatically assumes that my last trip leg (i.e., back to my origin city) is using the last transit method rather than the first. So for example, I’m flying to Hartford, CT, and from there, driving lots of places, then back to Hartford to fly home. I entered this data:
Trip: Omaha -> Hartford by Plane
Added stop: to New York by Car
Added stop: to Boston by Car
Added stop: to Portland, ME by Car
Added stop: to Hartford by Car
I think the logic might be that each stop should have its transit method defined, but I think instead (if you want to do multi-leg trips) they need to be treated as segments. So instead of having Hartford, NY, Boston, Portland, Hartford as destinations with Omaha implied (home), it would be Omaha-Hartford, Hartford-New York, New York-Boston, Boston-Portland, Portland-Hartford, Hartford-Omaha. If everything is explicit, it’s harder for the system to assume the wrong thing.
:) Thanks!
Erica
I realise this would be complicating something nice and simple, but…
Let’s say I’m going on a trip to city A, then city B, then returning home. All of the trip is by plane except when I travel between A and B, which is by car. It’s not very clear at the moment what method of transport is being used to travel from city B back home. Plane or car?
It seems like the mode of transport is currently associated with a destination, rather than the journey between two destinations…?
Not that useful to Rebecca the Skype nomad. I’m part through a trip too and I can’t add past or future stops.
It would be very useful to be able to edit related trips after they’ve been entered. As it is, you have to delete all related trips and start over in order to change or add a leg to a trip. Nice start, though. Thanks.
I came back to Dopplr for exactly this feature so I’m disappointed that it’s been disabled – expecially as I’m a firefox user! As a nomad myself (without skype’s help) I’d love to be able to model my family’s eight-month hop around the globe.
Since the multi-trip feature appeared, my FB integration has died. Could it be that my Dopplr home is BKK, and my FB home is Singapore?
Curiouser and curiouser. . .
Although I can see my Dopplr widget on my profile in FB, my friend Carolyn says that she can’t:
> strange! i don’t see it on yours at all — but i see mine on my profile, and i
> see david’s on his… hmm.
>
> ~ on 29/05/2008 01:17 Nick Palevsky typed…
>> The widget still shows up on my profile (gifs gone in the cutting and
>> pasting):
>>
>>
>>> Nick is in Singapore until June 4th and has planned a trip to Tokyo in June.
>>>
>>> + Add a trip
>>>
>>> Last updated
>>
>> I’ll try posting a comment. . .
>>
>> On 5/29/08 1:06 PM, “Carolyn Anhalt” wrote:
>>
>>> yeah there’s definitely some roughness to the multi-leg trip feature. what i
>>> noticed first off was that it actually saves the trips as individual trips
>>> but
>>> copies the same notes to each one. I have my home as italy in fb and oakland
>>> in
>>> dopplr, and it seems to show all my upcoming trips… although the next few
>>> weren’t created multi-leg. i’m finding just creating nested trips works
>>> better,
>>> e.g., I did Borgo a Mozzano 1 – 8 June and Lucca 3 – 7 June. And if you
>>> create
>>> your next trip to start the last day of the previous trip, it all works
>>> quite
>>> smoothly.
>>>
>>> I don’t see any of your dopplr trips in FB — did you remove the widget?
It would be good if you were able to add a stop while editing an existing trip, which currently doesn’t seem to be possible.
Hi developpers,
I too came back to DOPPLR for the multi-trip feature and see how the carbon footprint calculator would work. I’m a bit disappointed though that the multi-trip feature is not up to its best and agree with all the comments above. My question is: When can you fix this?
You have all raised some excellent issues/questions. We definitely agree that the multiple-stop feature needs improvement, but wanted to make it available as quickly as possible so that people could get started with it. I’ll get some answers to specific questions and post them soon.
Unfortunately, your avowed dislike for violations of the space-time continuum is meaningless, given that Dopplr can’t distinguish anything more granular than a day.
For example, I told Dopplr that I am currently in Dundee, Scotland, and that on 21 June, I shall travel by train to Inverkeithing, then by auto (actually bus) to Turnhouse, then by plane to Newark, then by train to Trenton (actually Hamilton), and by auto to Mount Holly (actually Hainesport).
Similarly, I told Dopplr that on 5 July, I shall travel by auto to Newark, by plane to Minneapolis, by plane to Honolulu, and by plane to Hilo.
Even though I entered all those things in that order, Dopplr got confoozled and the “map” view has me ricocheting back and forth across the Atlantic a few times on the 21st, and across the US and eastern Pacific a few times on the 5th.
What’s that you say? I’m giving Dopplr too much granularity? I shouldn’t tell it about individual airports where I might only spend a couple hours? Well, I’m taking a train across the country here, all the way to Glasgow, in a couple days. For a couple hours. Then back again. Why? For lunch with a friend and former colleague. And if I’m in an airport for a couple hours, it’s not unreasonable for me to run into someone I know.
This is supposed to be a site for frequent international travelers, right? :) Let me specify times – and teach it what time zone everything is in – and you’ll have something useful that doesn’t scribble all over the map meaninglessly trying to keep up with me. ;)
Oh, gotta add… your wanna-be-competitors Placely *have* 1-minute granularity. With timezones. (Although I’m unconvinced that they’ve ever heard of daylight savings time…) You’ve clearly got them beat in terms of userbase size and some other things, but this is a feature you need. :)
love it! \(^_^)/
I too would like to see ‘boat’ added as a mode of transportation.
Is there a way to keep all of the ‘hops’ of a multi-stop trip on one page? I’m going on a road trip this week and wanted to put all the destinations into one trip (so there would also need to be a way to add an extra destination to an existing multi-stop trip) and also have all of the photos I take alongside the complete trip (rather than for each leg of the trip).
Any chance that the stops don’t make me “go home” and back?
Maybe in the next release?
Is the ‘add another stop’ function working now (it isn’t on my browser)