As we mentioned earlier, we’ve been working hard to improve the Trip and Journal pages.

You can now add pictures to trips; find out who in your network is likely to have the most amount of expertise about that destination (based on frequency of visits there); and see “sparklines” and other visualisations of the information.

You can also add private notes on trips and see who lives in your trip destination. Pictures can be added from Flickr, and we have a Facebook connection.

The Journal, your record of activity on Dopplr, is now much more detailed and includes a calendar widget to help you look at your past trips. You can also access others’ journals if they share their trips with you. There’s also a web feed that you can subscribe to for automated updates.

Dopplr now gives you email alerts about coincidences in your trusted network. If somebody is coming to your town, or happens to be travelling where you are, you will get an alert in your inbox. You can change your email alert settings on this page.

As MattB notes in a comment in another posting, we just upgraded the way we handle time zones. Your location is calculated just after midnight in your current location rather than midnight GMT, as was previously the case.

What does this mean? Basically this: Travellers in California will no longer have their departures announced 8 hours early.

This week we’ve launched two super new ways to browse your trip information.

Trip pages

Every trip on Dopplr now has its own page that gathers everything we know about the trip. Follow the ‘More details on this trip’ link on your trip list to see.

Trip pages are a place to keep private notes, to read comments left by others, and to see who’s there at the same time. They gather related information: who do you know who often visits there, and who lives there. There’s a sparkline visualisation so you can see how busy the city is before and after your visit. As with everything else on Dopplr, trip pages are only visible to travellers you share trips with, and only display information from travellers who share trips with you.

You can now register your Flickr account with us, and if you look at a trip from the past then we’ll use Flickr’s API to pull in photos taken on those dates (and, for data packrats, any tagged with the machine tag dopplr:trip=xxx where xxx is the number from the trip page’s URL). If you use our Facebook app then we’ll do the same thing with your Facebook photos. Incidentally, this means you’ll be able to find contacts from Flickr who are also Dopplr users on our Invite Via Other Networks page.

We’ll be adding lots more detail and features to trip pages over time. If you’ve got ideas about what further information we can collect about your trips (or gather from other websites like we do with Flickr and Facebook), use the site feedback to let us know.

Journals

Your journal is your summary of everything that’s happening on Dopplr that relates to you - every trip you’ve taken, every new traveller you’ve shared trips with, and every travel coincidence. There’s a calendar widget so you can explore your trip history. This journal tab also appears on other travellers’ pages, so if someone shares their trips with you then you can explore their trip history too.

The journal has a Web feed that has all the same information in it. Subscribe to this feed in your newsreader and you’ll never miss a Dopplr update again. I put mine in the centre panel of my iGoogle homepage so I’m always up to date with my network of travellers.

Several people have asked us for a way to list their trips on their blog, so today we’ve added a blog badge system. Visit your account page and follow the link to “Add a Dopplr badge to your blog” to get the code to paste into your templates. Written in unobtrusive Javascript, it only uses a couple of lines of HTML and will work with any blogging system as it requires no server-side plugin.

You can also customise the display; if you want us to be a little vague about dates, to hide future trips and only show your current location, or even to hide the badge from visitors who aren’t fellow Dopplr travellers, that’s fine by us.

I’ve just tested the iCal export (from Dopplr) as an import into Microsoft Outlook on Windows. It works, at least on the latest (2007) version of Outlook, which I’m running on Windows XP inside a virtual machine on my Mac (thank you, thank you, Apple, for moving to the Intel architecture).

The full instructions are in an update to this previous posting.

If you have an earlier version of Outlook, please let us know if this works on that as well.

This also works with Evolution on Linux, and I would assume it also works with Mozilla Thunderbird on various platforms.

This week, after a dinner conversation with Stowe Boyd, I’ve been adding new features to our Atom feeds.

From your Account page, you’ll now find a link to a feed that just contains your trips (optionally with past trips included too). Why would you want this? Because the feed contains a lot of machine-readable information. Here are some ways to use it:

Put your itinerary on your blog sidebar

Most modern blog systems will take an Atom feed URL and import the entries as a sidebar on your blog:

Map it in Google Maps

Google Maps understands the GeoRSS entries in the feed. Here’s all the trips I’ve shared since Dopplr began in early 2007:

View Larger Map

Export from NetNewsWire to iCal

Just like the main Dopplr site, the new feed uses the hCalendar microformat which some feedreaders can use to import trip details into calendar software. Here’s a screenshot of NetNewsWire importing a trip into Apple iCal:

Use your Javascript, your Yahoo Pipes and your imagination

The examples above are just a few suggestions I came up with this afternoon, and I didn’t even mention the Google Data-compatible event data. With a bit of extra work, I’m sure you’ll come up with something much more interesting.

Remember that the URL for your trip feed is personal to you - it’s got a code on it that no one will be able to guess. So think carefully if you’re going to embed that URL in a public widget (like I’ve done with mine in the Google Map above). Once someone has the URL, they’ll be able to follow your trips through that feed, even if they’re not a Dopplr member. Personally I don’t mind if my trips are visible in public, but you might feel differently. Code carefully.

Since we launched our updated place database last week we’ve been working on a number of improvements which have just gone live.

A couple of people pointed out that we still don’t list some important cities (including Hobart, the capital of Tasmania). On advice from Marc of Geonames, we’ve been able to add all capitals cities that they know about in their database. We’ve also made capitals the default selection whenever there’s a name clash. For example, if you type Hobart then we’ll assume you mean Australia and not Hobart, Indiana. I should add that if you’ve listed a trip to Hobart, Indiana before then we’ll remember that next time and use it next time in preference.

Secondly, we’ve had a few long-standing naming confusions in our database. Geonames uses local naming whenever possible. Outside Ireland it’s not well-known that Dublin is really called Baile Átha Cliath. To avoid confusion, we’ve tidied up several such names. This should make adding trips to Moscow, Prague, Rotterdam and Frankfurt a little simpler. We haven’t forgotten the original naming - we still do the right thing if you search for Москва - but the defaults are now English names.

This week, Dopplr got a big upgrade in the way it handles places. Firstly, we’ve expanded our coverage of locations to nearly 200,000 cities worldwide. We now list every place that has a population figure in Geonames. We’ve still got a way to go in coverage, but it’s a huge improvement. We’ve also reworked our city URL structure and our search pages. People of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, rejoice.

The bigger the location database gets, the more potential there is for complexity in our UI. We’ve handled this with some rather pleasant and appropriate uses of Ajax and geocoding services. When you add a trip to a place like ‘Oxford’, ‘Cambridge’ or ‘Springfield’, we check your trip history and the most popular trip destinations and make a suggestion - perhaps you mean “Cambridge, United Kingdom”?. If we’re really stumped, we turn to Google’s geocoder, like so:

1. Google, where is “Sherman Oaks”? (Sherman Oaks is a district of Los Angeles)
2. Google says “Sherman Oaks, CA, USA at 34.15116,-118.44456″
3. We look in our database and ask, what�s the nearest thing to that location that we know?
4. We find Beverly Hills, CA, USA at 34.0736,-118.4 and offer it as a suggestion.

This also means that you can add trips using any location style that Google knows about - postcode, zipcode, airport IATA code and many more.

UPDATE: We’ve made a few more refinements in response to comments below.

At Dopplr we’re big fans of giving you your information anywhere you want it. Our philosophy is that you shouldn’t have to visit dopplr.com to get the benefits of membership. In the future this is going to mean a mobile-friendly stripped-down XHTML site, more interaction over SMS and integration with platforms like Twitter. For now, it mostly means feeds.

So far, most of the personal Atom and calendar feeds on Dopplr have used HTTP Basic Authentication to protect access. It turns out that even in 2007 there are some important newsreader applications that don’t support this scheme, and this has been causing problems for people.

Today we changed the feed URLs to use ‘obscure’ tokens as a privacy scheme. This means you’ll no longer need to enter a password to access a feed because each URL is personalised to you with an unguessable token like 53adfbc52bffabefd44cdf0a7383247040dbd99eb65a07365952059dc3849c95. Of course, because the URL is all you need to read your information, you should take care not to reveal it in public or share it with anyone you don’t trust.

We haven’t disabled the original scheme; if you’ve already subscribed to a feed and it’s working for you then it should continue to work. However, any new feed URL that you get from the site will work in the new way.

The one exception to this is personal iCal feeds. If you’re reading your itinerary through a calendar application then it’ll have a URL like http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/mattb/ical. This will no longer work and you’ll need to visit your account page and get a new URL. I’m sorry about that.

As always, if you have problems then don’t hesitate to get in touch by sending feedback through the site.