WordPress for Android (With Swype)

I’m writing this post on a mobile phone using Swype — dragging my finger over the keyboard instead of typing. It’s incredibly innovative technology. Even if I accidentally move my finger in the wrong direction, Swype can usually figure out which word I mean. It’s much faster than typing on a mobile phone keyboard or screen. It’s actually quite fast to enter a blog post this way — almost as fast as typing on a desktop computer.

Testing out WordPress for BlackBerry with Vlingo Speech-to-Text

I’m writing this blog post as I walk down the street by speaking into a mobile phone. I’m using a combination of Vlingo and WordPress for BlackBerry. The voice recognition isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty close. Considering that Vlingo didn’t need to be trained to my voice, it’s surprisingly accurate.

I could see hostels using this kind of setup to promote their tours, pub crawls, and other activities. It makes blogging from anywhere very easy.

Blog now has tags

I’ve added tags to the hostel marketing blog.  Another tag cloud coming soon…

New hostel search feature

Screenshot of the new hostel directory search feature. The tag cloud is now at the top of the page:

Thanks to the Drupal tagadelic module, jstools, and a quick custom search module.

New feature: search hostels by city

I’ve added a new feature to the hostel directory. If you visit a hostel’s page (like the Generator Berlin hostel), it now has a link to all the listed hostels in Berlin.

It took a bit of time to figure out how to split Drupal’s $terms into its parts in the way that I wanted.

To break up taxonomy, you can use:

<?php
foreach($node->taxonomy as $term){
print $term->name.' ';
}
?>

I created custom link text using Drupal’s link function. It’s working great…

Travel and Hospitality Marketing Blog

I’ve decided to add the hospitality and travel marketing blog here:
http://www.hostelmanagement.com/blog

The first post will be published today or tomorrow.

Hospitality Marketing Blog

I am thinking about starting a hospitality marketing blog on Hostel Management.

Should it go at blog.hostelmanagement.com or www.hostelmanagement.com/blog?

I think the latter is going to work best, but I’m open to ideas…

Site Improvements

There was another spam attack in the hostel forums while I was sleeping last night, so I made some upgrades on the site. The improvements aren’t visible, but they will speed up removal of the spam and also have the side effect of reducing overall server load.

New Dev Blog

This blog is to provide updates for and cover development topics on HostelManagement.com.

More information coming soon.