Introducing the Interactive Travel Map

Last updated on January 23rd, 2017 at 07:39 am

Updated January 2017: We have updated the Map even further you can find it under “Inspiration” on the menu, or just click here. The map unfortunately isn’t interactive anymore because island nations did not show up, but you can still drill down by country and it show density of posts.

This weekend has been spent doing some much needed maintenance on the blog, in particular I have spent a bunch of time building out an interactive travel map that showcases many of the locations I have visited over the years.

While it’s not perfect yet, I am very happy with where it is at today: dynamically pulling in pages from destinations across the world, adding a world and country map to the mix, and showing the posts that I have made about a specific area.

Here is what the main map page looks like:

You can view the map from the main navigation menu (Interactive Travel Map). I am using the Google Charts API to generate the map and some crazy WordPress query magic to make the pages dynamic and data driven. While it took quite a bit of time to complete, it will start to immediately pay off when I add new content, because the map will be updated automatically.

If you look at the map, you may think that it’s a little bit “light” when it comes to content, and that’s true. I am only about 5-10% done with the process of adding photos and creating content to this page. It is a project I will be chipping away at for the next few months/years.

I only have 6 of the 22 countries I have visited listed on the map, and barely any of my favorite destinations listed.

Why Build an Interactive Travel Map?

You may be wondering why I am spending my time building out interactive travel map and not just writing more. Well, I actually have a great reason: I find the destinations and pictures are often more interesting and long lasting than some of my blog posts have been. My preference is to write posts that are “long form” and take a lot of thought and research into writing. This means a lot of the posts I write are text heavy and about specific topics that may or may not be of interest to some people.

Do you know what is interesting to everyone? Viewing awesome photos and stories from trips. If you are planning to visit a destination, wouldn’t it be nice to read someone’s story about the location first? That is what I hope that I can do for my readers by building out the interactive travel map.

My other reason? I have 13,000 photos sitting on my hard drive and most of them are awesome. What better place to put them than on Jeffsetter?

New Destinations Added to the Travel Map

Today I added two new addition to the destinations on the interactive travel map:

• Christmas Time in Amsterdam
• Milford Sound in New Zealand 

I am going to try and post 2-3 locations a week and see how far that gets me. Let me know if you want to see a particular location from my old map added to the new map!

Jeffsetter Newsletter is Coming Together

The other thing you may have noticed is that I am starting to tout a signup for the Jeffsetter newsletter. My plan is to roll out a newsletter style email campaign that will show you my most recent posts, travel map updates and more on a regular basis.

Hope to see you subscribe!