About This Site

 

In addition to the information below, you might be interested in the Story of Building TwinF

When we started planning the trip, we decided that we would use the web to conduct an experiment to see if we could collect first-hand travel information before and during the trip. This site is that experiment.

When we would talk about the trip, people would tell us all kinds of great information and we would write it on a napkin and it would disappear.

So, we created this site as a way to collect first-hand travel information from people like you. So, this site only does two things:

  1. Chronicles our trip in the form of a blog (on the front page). This will help friends, family and anyone on the Internet to follow what we do.
  2. Collects and organizes first-hand travel information, based on countries we plan to visit.

Together, we hope to create a resource that will improve the experience of our trip.

About this site (for geeks)

I'm Lee and I've been a blogger since 2003 on my personal blog (leelefever.com) and my professional blog (commoncraft.com).

This site is related to what I do for a living, which I call "Social Design for the Web". I work with businesses to use the web as a way to work with customers in a social setting. You might call it "online communities".

Anyway, TwinF came out of thinking about ways to use social web tools to accomplish a specific goal, in this case, to collect travel information.

It's built on an open source platform called Drupal. The guys at Bryght are helping with hosting the site and some code-fu. Good guys, Bryght.

There are some basic principles at work here:

We're really trying to keep it simple and focused on the trip. We aren't trying to build a travel "community" - we won't have time for that. We just want to collect information.

We want the site to be an example of some of the new things the web offers. This includes RSS integration, easy content management, a focus on user-generated content and a strong blogging focus.

Because we'll be traveling, the site will also become an example of nomadic and/or mobile blogging.

We'll also be using a lot of popular web services like Flickr and Del.icio.us to help us organize information. Keep an eye out for the "TwinF" tag.

 Refills are free...