Welcome to our tutorial series on Trip creation, better known as “Everything you ever wanted to know about trip creation but were afraid to ask!”

Part 1 -The basics

In part 2 of the trip creation tutorial series, we demonstrate how to upload pictures, how to manage them once they are uploaded, and how to view them and share them with others.

Part 2 - Managing pictures

In part 3 of the trip creation tutorial series, we explore the intricacies of creating itineraries in full details

Part 3 - The itinerary

In part 4 of the trip creation tutorial series, we take a look at how to view an animation of the trips!

Part 4 - The animation player

In this fifth instalment of the Trip creation tutorial series, we’ll delve into the inner secrets of journal entries!

Part 5 - Journals and blogs

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You need sound enabled on your system to listen to the tutorial.  The tutorials are best viewed if you maximize the browser window.

Badih

Here’s what’s new:

• Shares tracking and control. If you are an editor you can see who sent the shares, when, and even disable them if you need to. Non-editors can track only their own shares.
• Nicer, cleaner emails. We like our emails to be small, clean, and easy to read. We’ve put a lot of work into them, we hope you’ll like them too.
• Improvements in the registration process, not something that you care about once you signup on Zipalong
• Many small improvements and fixes all over the place

How do you get to track your shares?

This is a fun release, we’re quite happy with it. No huge new features, but we love the result. So here what’s new in this release:

• The trip Cover page got a makeover (check it out here). Not only does it look better, it also makes it easier to see what a trip is about.
• Much improved friend-finder, check it out on your Find Friends or Friends pages. You can now lookup your friends on Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL, LinkedIn, and many others.
• Added a picture control panel right in the Slideshow, so you can easily delete or rotate pictures without having to open the picture details dialog. Very convenient.
• We now have a set of cute request icons right on the Home page. It makes it easier to tell what the request is all about.
• Even faster loading pages, just when we thought we couldn’t be any faster
• And as always we’ve addressed a large number of feedbacks, too long to mention here.

Eye candy

The same story in pictures:

Flashy new trip Cover page

Improved friend-finder

Slideshow picture control panel

Request icons

We’re already hard at work on the next batch of features which should hit production in about a week.

This release has been in the works for 3 weeks, but thankfully there’s the holidays, shopping, and partying to blame it on…

What’s new this release:

• Trip embeddability: build your trips on Zipalong and then include them in other web pages, such as your blog. More on this below.
• The newsfeed is now filtered correctly based on the privacy settings of the items listed in the feed, even for news from the past.
• You can now change your email from the account settings dialog, if you so desire.
• We’ve added the ability to rotate a picture to the left too, as rotating a picture 3 times to obtain the same effect is sort of annoying.
• New users can get in the site without having to first confirm their email. Instant gratification is not all that bad…
• People with multiple accounts can now merge the accounts during the sign-up process. This is particularly handy if you created an account when you signed up using your Facebook account, and then decided to create another one using a regular email address.
• And last but not least, quite a few feedbacks have been addressed.

Trip Embeddability

You can now embed trips that you build on Zipalong in other pages, just like you embed Youtube videos. The eye-candy should tell the rest of the story:

You click the “Embed” link:

Copy the HTML snippet:

And once you embed it in the page, you get something like so (this is what you get from clicking the “See a demo” link from the above dialog):

Default account email

You can now change it (but you can also use the old one to login to Zipalong). Here’s how to do it:

Feedbacks

We’ve received a lot of good feedbacks lately, and we are hard at work implementing some of the good ideas that were suggested, so stay tuned!

Hot on the heels of 1.4.0, version 1.5.6 sees the light of day today. This version is aimed at tying some loose ends left over from the previous release, and addressing quite a few feedbacks we got from you.

What’s new in this release:

• Your Friends and Trips pages have been changed to match the new icon standards that’s now used throughout the site. More to come later, as we have some really cool plans for these pages.
• For the users that don’t have a profile picture, we now have new, gender-based place holders.
• We have integrated this blog with the site news that are being inserted in a user’s news feed. Now you’ll see links from the site news to the relevant blog entry.
• We have addressed a long-standing request to have a more intuitive display of dates in the itinerary summary for closed-loop itineraries. A closed loop itinerary is one where you go A->B->C>A. We now handle such cases much better.
• Better handling of errors, we hope you’ll never get to enjoy these
• Lots of smaller improvements throughout the site.

Next is much improved privacy support and easier way to connect to your friends. If you would like other features in the next release, just use the “feedback” link at the top of the page.

Alright folks. It’s been 6 weeks in the making but after some hard work and many sleepless nights, plus several re-writes of the code, we’re getting close to releasing a preview of a revolutionary way to plan, view and share trips!!

We won’t let the cat out of the box just yet. There is still a week or two of fine tuning to be done before we are ready to release the feature for prime time consumption but we thought we should get you ready for it!

For the last two weeks we’ve been hard at work giving Zipalong a much needed make-over! The first installment of this effort saw the light of day Tue morning, on Oct 14, 2008.

What’s new in this release:

• The user Profile page, and his or her Trips and Friends pages were totally redesigned from the ground up: nicer to look at, easier to read, faster to load and navigate. Pretty cool are the new Travel buddies left column on the Trips page, and the new XYZ says left column on the Profile page
• Zipalong now uses differently sized icons for users, trips, pictures, etc, so you can more easily tell the difference between them
• People you invite to the site directly or to join one of your trips are greeted by a slick welcome screen, are given a much easier “landing” on the site, with short, helpful messages along the way. As a bonus, they can now use their Facebook account to join the site
• The old welcome pages have been replaced by a simpler, nicer welcome page
• The trip Cover page now loads significantly faster. We love a speedy site, and we are always trying to make Zipalong load and feel faster

We hope you enjoy the changes, but even if you hate them, we’d like to hear from you. Just use the “feedback” link found in the top-right corner of every page.