Since this project started and have pretty good index with google , I just scrapped the temporary built in search I created and added Google Search instead, nothing fancy just simple search. Plus I reworked the UI and major coding on the backend side to allow me to turn off URL rewriting on the fly. So far looking good, next is the ability to add review on a listing. Stay tuned.

Rewrote the entire signup process and instead decided to use Facebook’s social plugins. Facebook has around 500Million members.  No need for me to recreate a sign up process. First plugin installed is the Single Sign on, so if you have a facebook account you are automatically signed in to the site and you can add your business listing. Keeping to the theme of the site you can only list Travel Agencies, Restaurants, Hotels and Resorts currently only limited to the Philippines. Your submission will still be manually be screened before we approved it.

Next plugin is the comments and like plugin, each listing now you can add your comments on the listing or better write a feedback.

Thats it for now, alot more changes coming soon.

In the spirit of documenting stuffs added to this project. I decided to do some mashups, first mashup is Twitter Feeds. I’ve also setup a new twitter account for T&G(Travel & Gobble). Follow us on Twitter.

Heyall, after about 9 months of not touching this project, finally found some time to revive it since I’m not that busy anymore. Good thing though even if I wasn’t doing much with the site is that I fixed the SEO by rewriting the URLs, now I got a very large number of pages indexed by Google, 6K pages is not bad, I now need to convert those pages to page views for more traffic, once I get a suitable amount of traffic, next plan is to monetize to pay for the hosting and domain of this site.

So expect this project to get alot more busier this coming weeks.

The past couple weeks was  a busy one due to the other projects commitments I have. Not much implementation done on Travel and Gobble besides the new modified SEO friendly URL which are more keyword rich. I was perfecting the SEO URL and one of the reason why I haven’t submitted any sitemaps yet to any search engines. Now that the URLS are SEO friendly we will be ready when we get crawled. Still requires a bit more content so will keep on adding content and new features.

So after a short week we got indexed by google.com, we haven’t done a major promotion yet on the site as it’s still for beta run. We just added new features and more content that I like to share as we continually enhance the site before it gets prime time. New features are the following since last update.

• Ratings.  We now have ability to rate an establishment and record by IP to thwart away who try to vote more than once.
• Simple pagination for listings. To be enhanced soon.
• Checking for establishment for branches on other location
• Simple search friendly URL and away with dirty dynamic URLs.
• As for content we got more restaurants listed. Will soon add the option to tie up the establishment to your account IF you own the business.

So that’s it for now, more features to come.  So stay tuned.

Finally got this site up. After months of planning and building it along with my busy schedule I finally have the prototype up for beta testing.  Travel and Gobble will be the one stop resources for travel guides and dining in the Philippines.

The website features are not fully 100% done as planned. I can say its only about 30%. I started the directory system from scratch and contemplated on recreating it as a plugin instead for  Wordpress, however that would make more delay on it’s release as of my limited time coding for the site. So I decided to release as beta  as planned. Maybe when I get more time I can create it as a plugin. There are alot more features to be released on the website soon. So for now please feel free to sign up and add your business listing. If you need to contact me please email me at “info @ travelandgobble dot com”.