Planet Nik

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Posted by nik.clayton on california, usa, oakland at Wed, 05 Sep 2007 02:34:24 -0000 | Permalink

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Posted by nik.clayton on california, people, usa, oakland, murraystokely, paulsaab at Wed, 05 Sep 2007 02:34:21 -0000 | Permalink

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Posted by nik.clayton on california, people, usa, oakland, murraystokely, paulsaab at Wed, 05 Sep 2007 02:34:19 -0000 | Permalink

If you’re a frequent (or even semi-frequent) traveller then you may be interested in a website that I’ve been using for the past few months.

TripIt exists to make it easy to manage one or more travel itineraries, and to share those itineraries with other people (who can be passive viewers, or active collaborators).

Signing up is easy, requiring the minimum of personal information. Once you’ve registered and activated your account you can start adding to your trip itineraries. It is possible to do this the tedious, manual way, by typing in the details of you trip — flights, car hire, accommodation bookings, and so on.

However, TripIt has an ace up its sleeve.

By forwarding the confirmation e-mails that you receive from the airline, travel agent, car rental company, and so on, to a special address @tripit.com from the e-mail address you signed up with, TripIt’s systems will parse out the relevant details and import them as itinerary items in to your schedule. You can then amend them as necessary. This makes adding details a breeze.

As well as details for flights, accommodation, and car rental you can also add (Google) maps to your itinerary, either as simple maps, or as directions, and notes.

The collaboration features are simple but effective. Enter the e-mail address of someone you want to share the trip details with, and choose whether you want them to be able to view the itinerary, or to be able to add items to it too. They receive an e-mail with a custom URL allowing them to view/edit the trip details as necessary. These invitations can be managed by the original trip owner, and rescinded as necessary. Collaborators can add notes and comments to the itinerary, amend existing events, and add new ones.

For me this feature alone makes TripIt worthwhile. I no longer need to leave my mother detailed information about my travels around the world (she’s a mother, of course she worries). I can just invite her to view the trip details.

TripIt’s able to include other pertinent information in your itinerary that it gleans from the Internet. For example, for flights where it can determine the aircraft type it includes links to the relevant pages on SeatGuru, direct online check-in links, options to check the flight status, a brief display of the weather forecast for the destination, and so forth.

Other useful features include a “TripThis” bookmarklet which can be used to grab URLs of interesting pages and automatically add them to the itinerary, a “Travel Guide” for your destination, containing information culled from sites such as Wikipedia and Flickr, and growing support for “Friends” — not a feature I’ve used, but they describe as:

… which enables you to connect with other TripIt users. Once connected, you can view an online calendar of each other’s travel plans so you can keep track of traveling friends or business colleagues. This is the first of many tools that will make TripIt even more useful to organizing your travel…and organizing your friends too.

and TripSearch — again, not something I’ve used yet, but it aims to make it easier to find and book flights, hotels, and so forth.

TripIt still has a few issues.

• It’s still quite US-centric. For example, when it imports flight details and displays them on the itinerary it includes the appropriate contact number for the airline. But this is the always the US contact number, rather than the local one.
• There’s no support for timezones yet — although this isn’t as big a problem as I’d expected.
• While there’s a calendar view of the trip available via the website it’s not possible to export this (say as iCal format) in to other applications (at least not that I’ve seen).

However, feedback that I’ve submitted to the developers has been responded to promptly, and I’ve seen features that I’ve suggested appear on the site quite rapidly, so it’s entirely possible that these issues will be addressed soon.

Despite these few shortcomings TripIt has proved to be very useful, both in allowing me to easily organise my travel details, and in making it very easy to share these with other people. It also makes it simple to print out a detailed itinerary that contains all the relevant information, which is much nicer than carrying around print outs of half a dozen different confirmation e-mails which all have their information in different formats.

TripIt’s service is free, and they are still in invitation-only beta mode. I have two invites left, and the first two people to request an invite in the comments can have them — just leave your e-mail address.

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Posted by nik on review at Tue, 04 Sep 2007 14:20:54 -0000 | Permalink

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Posted by nik.clayton on california, usa, mountainview at Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:15:04 -0000 | Permalink

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Posted by nik.clayton on california, usa, mountainview at Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:14:49 -0000 | Permalink

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Posted by nik.clayton on california, usa, mountainview at Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:14:38 -0000 | Permalink

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Posted by nik.clayton on california, usa, mountainview at Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:14:00 -0000 | Permalink

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Posted by nik.clayton on california, usa, mountainview at Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:13:57 -0000 | Permalink

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Posted by nik.clayton on california, usa, mountainview at Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:13:40 -0000 | Permalink

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Posted by nik.clayton on california, usa, mountainview at Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:13:35 -0000 | Permalink

I note that British Airways e-receipt e-mails are probably going astray for a lot of people.

I’ve had to book a few flights with BA recently. Up until a couple of weeks ago their acknowledgment e-mails came through fine. And then I stopped receiving them. Taking the time to delve in to the mail logs yesterday I noticed this:

Aug 20 07:47:45 jc sm-mta[15347]: l7KElEmk015347: ruleset=check_mail, 
  arg1=website +LHS=RHS@bounce.baplc.com, 
  relay=ceba-mgw04.baplc.com [163.166.43.64], 
  reject=553 5.1.8 website +LHS=RHS@bounce.baplc.com... 
  Domain of sender address website+LHS=RHS@bounce.baplc.com does not exist

(I’ve redacted the left and right hand side of the actual e-mail address it was being sent to)

If that’s just so much gibberish to you, it says that BA are sending e-mails with a return path of …@bounce.baplc.com. Working through the logs shows that they’ve been doing this for some time.

But at some point in the last few weeks, someone at BA has removed the bounce.baplc.com entry from their DNS. So my, and countless other systems around the world, will begin rejecting messages.

This rejection is quite correct. Since bounce.baplc.com doesn’t exist, my system (and any other system with the same configuration) will have nowhere to send any bounces that might occur. And sending messages from domains that do not exist is also an exceedingly common spammer tactic.

I’ve used the “Report problems with our site” feature to report this to BA, but I don’t have high hopes of anyone listening.

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Posted by nik on spam at Tue, 21 Aug 2007 07:42:26 -0000 | Permalink