HotelChatter

By the way

We do have comments! If you've just gotten here from MetaFilter, or anywhere else, pop your head up and say hi. I hate feeling like I'm talking to a wall. Who are you? What do you want to see here?

Ah, it becomes clearer

I was thinking yesterday "it would be good if there was some indication that a comment had been made". I see now that there is no indication when no comment exists, but there is when a comment is added. I love the concept of what you have created here and hope that it soon reaches that critical mass that will turn it into a useful tool.

Threaded commenting system :-(

Don't like threads?

You can change how comments are displayed if you don't like threads. Try "Flat" in the appropriate select box there. You've also got permanent comment preferences to the right, in your user prefs stuff. To be honest, it'll still be threaded, in that replies will appear after the comment they're a reply to, but it will display without the indenting.

I'm working on stuff that may hopefully turn it into a useful tool. Like for example now if you write a review, and put in thre address of the hotel (and it's in the US) we'll have the place's latitude and longitude. There will be an interface whereby you can search for hotels near a particular zip code or address, or you can even pull out that information with a page request that gets you back an RSS feed. I've got some other plans cooking too, which I'm not sure are possible to do yet. We shall see.

But I'd really like to hear other people's ideas, especially people who travel a lot. What could we add that would be useful?

Hotels close to ...

How about a feature that would allow you to search for a hotel close to a particular place, such as the venue of a seminar or another hotel? I have no idea how you could code this, but I have often been looking for hotels close to an event in cities I have never been to and this can be a nightmare.

Thanks for the advice re comment threading. Viewing them flat is better, but I still do not like the whole concept of threaded comments. Just a personal thing to do with being too dense to be able to follow the conversation.

Close to...

Funny you should mention that -- I just finished implementing it. Try, for example, http://www.hotelchatter.com/near/10019/20 to find hotels within 20 miles of zip code 10019 (which happens to be New York).

The functionality works, I just gotta put up a nice interface to it. Expect that tomorrow. I'm beat.

stavrosthewonderchook here.

Verify email went AWoL on me, so I'm an Anonymous Hero for the moment, and didn't post anything. Thanks for the linkage, rusty! Hope folks get a chuckle outta the tale.

(PS the washrooms at my new job have bidets too. My eyes are brighter and my... er, tail, um... bushier than I believe they have ever been. Life is good.)

Huh

It didn't bounce back to me. Maybe it got spam-filtered? I can send you a password, in any case, if you don't get it.

Please...

If you could, rusty, that'd be cool. Dunno where it went!

Thanks.