Lifestreaming App Developed During a 5 Year Sailing Journey

Chris Myles embarked on a sailing trip that lasted 5 1/2 years, spanning 32,800+ miles, where he visited 24 countries, and spent 160 nights at sea. He wanted a way to be able to share his adventure including maps, photos, videos, and blogging easier, so he decided to develop his own app. Blurbits is the result of his effort.

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example of Blurbits

I played around with the above Blurbit which can be found here and enjoyed navigating the map and discovering the associated content used to document each leg of the journey. Clicking on the previous / next links would refresh the map to the next location traveled, generate a content popup (photo or teaser blog post) and then refresh the frame below with whatever additional content was available. There are also several other funtions provided on a navigation strip to view the stream in different ways, along with the ability to view additional related content such as Wikipedia entries represented as icons based on geo locations. It’s a bit difficult to explain, so your best bet is to go visit the site and play around.

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Using Blurbits to generate your own travelstream will require some patience to learn the system. The basic concept behind Blurbits is a set of online tools which requires you to learn and append custom URL parameters to the existing URL paths of their tools. You can view some examples and learn more about how to create Blurbits on this page. But if you really want to understand the complete toolset your best bet is to start by visiting the Blurbits introduction page that provides resources to the complete system.

It’s a pretty extensive set of utilities and I can’t really provide extensive info here, but if I’ve piqued your curiosity, it’s worth taking a look. Also, if you find using a Lifestreaming approach to document your travels interesting, then you may also want to take a look at this post I wrote which also covered another person putting together a tool-set to do something similar.

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