TravelFeed blogs are live: Get yours now!

in TravelFeed3 years ago

Read this post on TravelFeed.io for the best experience


In the past months, we have been working on a very exciting new product. Today, we are proud to introduce TravelFeed blogs. You can get started right now with setting up your own blog on your own domain, all from your TravelFeed dashboard and your existing TravelFeed posts.

Why TravelFeed Blogs if there is Wordpress?

Wordpress originally started out as a blogging software, but through its extensibility it has become much more than that. Wordpress is no longer limited to only blogging, through plugins it can also become an online shop or pretty much any web app, even a crypto exchange. This extendability does not come without a payoff though and there are many reasons why specialised solutions are able to offer a much better and more reliable experience. For example, for setting up an online shop, Shopify is often preferred over Wordpress add-on Woocommerce and many company blogs have switched from Wordpress to Ghost. However, most private bloggers are still in a love-hate-relationship with Wordpress, appreciating the extensibility and cheap hosting, but regularly growing frustrated with its problems and low performance.

No more Headache: Easy Peasy Blogging

If you have ever set up a blog in Wordpress, you will realize that it is everything but simple. Most bloggers start by watching hours after hours of tutorials to master the basics of Wordpress only to shoot their blog down after having installed a dozen different plugins. Even after you have configured a Wordpress blog, you have to invest time into maintenance regularly to update Wordpress, your plugins and themes - and if one update goes wrong and breaks your database or breaks compatibility between your plugins, themes and Wordpress itself, you have a problem. On the other hand, not only Wordpress itself, but every single plugin is a potential open gate to hackers, especially if you don’t update regularly.

With a TravelFeed blog, we manage all of this technical stuff for you, so you have no headache with setting up and managing your blog and you can focus on what you do best: Creating amazing content.

You can get started with your TravelFeed blog in under two minutes:

  1. Open the “Hosting” Tab in your TravelFeed Dashboard
  2. Choose a subdomain, name and slogan for your blog
  3. Configure optional settings such as your logo and color scheme
  4. Select which posts you want to have on your blog

That’s it! We automatically generate a blog customized for you and set it up on a complimentary subdomain, e.g. yourblog.truvvl.blog. Of course, you can assign your own domain as well.

Full Customizability with our Site Builder

No matter if you want Dark Mode, Sitemap, RSS, SEO optimization, Mobile Responsiveness, Search, Image Optimization, AMP, automated organisation by location: Instead of having to install a dozen plugins like on Wordpress, all your important features work out of the box on TravelFeed blogs!

However, you are not locked in to this automatic configuration: With the widget system of our site builder, we make it as easy as possible to change your blog to your liking - no coding skills required! 

While this does not give you quite as much extensibility as Wordpress, it comes without the headache of incompatible plugins and we are aiming to offer enough widgets to satisfy 99% of travel bloggers. However, we will focus on blogging since we believe that for advanced features such an online shop, you are better off setting that up separately with a service specialised on that (e.g. Shopify) and linking to it from your blog. While all your essential widgets are already available, we would love to hear which widgets you would like to see next: For example dynamic maps, your latest Instagram posts, a weather forecast for the destination of each post, a map of all the countries you visited or an integrated newsletter system? Let us know!

Watch the video below to see in action how easy it is to customize your TravelFeed blog:

Your Fastest Blog. Ever.

While Wordpress itself has received many updates since its launch in 2003, the basic technology hasn’t changed: Each time a user opens any subpage of the blog, his browser communicates with Wordpress the webserver, Wordpress then fetches the information from the database, generates the HTML and sends it back to the browser. This is slow, especially if you are using a low-performance server and when the server is located on the other side of the world, which happens very often for travel blogs that are accessed from anywhere. In fact, many Wordpress blogs are so slow that they rank worse in search engines because of that and loose potential income.

Contrary to Wordpress, for TravelFeed blogs, we are using cutting-edge technology: Every time you update your site, we fetch all the information from the database, generate the HTML for your most important pages and distribute it to a network of servers around the globe (CDN) while your less important pages are built in realtime the first time they are accessed. This means that it may take several minutes until changes are visible for your blog, but once a user accesses it, it loads lightning-fast, from anywhere in the world, and if one server goes down, your blog remains accessible from dozens of other servers! And through our use of a modern Single Page Application in combination with server-side rendering, navigating your site is even faster!

While a developer using headless Wordpress could theoretically achieve similar speeds, very few Wordpress blogs take advantage of this technology and on average, TravelFeed blogs are up to 19x faster than Wordpress blogs.

And the best thing: You don't need to worry about any of the technical stuff you just read ;)

Ready to Give it a Try?

TravelFeed blogs are available today. We are giving you the option to try hosting for free until March 31, 2021 - we are not asking for any payment information and if you take no action by then, your trial subscription will end automatically without any charge and we will stop hosting your blog. If you wish to keep your blog after that, we are aiming to keep it affordable.

There currently is a waitlist for getting access to TravelFeed blogs, but if you are subscribed to our newsletter, you will find a link there to get priority access! If you are not subscribed to our newsletter, join the waiting list now and we will reach out to you soon.

Wordpress Imports

Do you have an existing Wordpress blog that you want to migrate to TravelFeed? Now you can! With our new Wordpress import feature, you can import all posts and drafts from your Wordpress blog in a breeze. This works for both Wodpress.com blogs and regular hosted Wordpress installations! You find the new Wordpress import assistant under Integrations in your TravelFeed dashboard.

Join TravelFeed!

Are you not on TravelFeed yet? We invite you to check out TravelFeed.io and to join over 1000 travelers on our Discord community. We’re also looking for one more curator to join our team.

We’re in Beta and continuously improve TravelFeed, meaning that there are still some bugs. If you notice anything or have feedback for us, please don’t hesitate to contact us on Discord, leave a comment or open a bug report on Github!


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hey guys! are you going to open the blogs again? I would like to have mine!

Hi Helga, right now we are preparing the launch of TravelFeed Hosting, taking blogs out of beta. If you really can't wait, I can give you access to the beta right now, let me know 😄 Just be aware that there will be some larger updates soon.

This is really amazing guys. It's what i have been talking about for the past year in terms of building tools for regular people to use. This is something that even i can do in minutes. I've tried wordpress and it is not easy.

It's the start of how i imagine communities to be with customizable options for the site and a token backed by ad revenue to monetize it.
So interesting to see how you have gone and built it for personal blogs and i really love what you have done.

Hopefully over time we can see this become the norm for all kinds of blogs on hive now that your team has created such a good innovation for other to be inspired by.

If possible could you add hive
keychain support as hivesigner is really poor for user experience? Just something to consider, thanks.

Thank you! :) We believe that blockchain is approaching the turning point that the internet passed 20 years ago, where it went from that complicated thing for nerds to something everyone uses everyday without even thinking about it - and for blockchain to become accessible to everyone, it needs to become easy to use. We are happy to be one of many projects working on that :)

Thanks for your suggestion! We actually used to support Keychain, but moved to a different system in April when many nodes experienced issues with the hard fork mess (with some still running on Steem and others permanently offline or temporally overwhelmed) and the only thing we could do was to tell users to switch nodes on their end in the Keychain settings. In our new system, we post to Hive from our server through the posting authority given by Hivesigner. All posts are processed in a queue system, so if there is a problem with a node, we can switch to a different node (or run our own) and if the user doesn't have enough RC, the queue system will retry for 24 hours. The same applies if Hive would experience a downtime due to a hard fork - TravelFeed continues to work and will sync with the blockchain once Hive nodes are working again. This is how we can offer a smoother, faster and more reliable experience than most other dApps. We will look into integrating Keychain login with this new system, but this would work through posting authority and not by confirming each transaction manually like in most Keychain implementations.

Yeah hivesigner is a really really confusing experience i tried to log into your site yesterday and frankly I couldn't understand how to use hivesigner its that bad.

You can feel free to use our open-source Beacon software to know the status of nodes ... and I'm told you can give a suggestion to keychain for the user telling keychain which node to use.

Keychain login is live now - thanks again for the suggestion!

That sounds great, thanks for the info! Will definitely look into it

Just wanted to let you know that we are now supporting Keychain login - thanks again for your suggestion!

Well, it's been a while since I last wrote a travel post, 10+ months I think!

You may have just given me a reason to fire up the travel blogs again! What will your subscription fees be from March next year? I may speak to my Web developer and see if it's possible to integrate an iframe/window to my travelfeed blog and just have a tab on my new website.

Also, do you guys and gals have the travelfeed token set up yet or is that on a back burner for now?

Keep up the great work everyone!

Great hearing from you Nicky! We miss your travel blogs!

We are still planning on releasing a token, but after talking to lawyers in 3 countries, we still don't know where we are going to register in order to release a regulated token - we want to do this properly. We know about blogging and coding, but have very little experience in these business things, so we are currently looking for a co-founder with background in business administration.

What we plan is that if you stake a certain amount of our tokens, you wouldn't even have to pay any subscription fee. Otherwise, we are aiming to keep subscription fees at an affordable level, probably similar to Wix.com or Squarespace. How much would a TravelFeed blog be worth to you?

If you want to give it a try, don't forget to join the waitlist so you can get access as soon as possible! Integrating with your existing site should be possible, be it through iframe or through a menu link.

i know i am taking this from a wrong perspective :D but, essentially writing on travelfeed you have access to all the people on hive, on travelfeed site and you can automatically add content to your personal blog? interesting option, and it looks good.

I think @theycallmedan was talking about something similar as an idea for their vision on 3speak new development.

i was mentioning you in the last weeks for a good work on SEO, and how i was surprised with high ranking of my post on google search. you are doing a great job overall, i am hoping that conditions will get better and we could travel more next year.

Yes, exactly! And the great thing is that if you have your posts on your own blog, you can build yourself a passive income from advertising and affiliate revenue on top of the one-time Hive reward - if you have posts that have good SEO that is.

In the coming months, we will move ahead with the decentralisation of TravelFeed, so you don't depend on TravelFeed for your blog, but can also host it yourself or using a different provider. Moreover, we are working on a licensing protocol that takes advantage of decentralised storage (like current posts on Hive that are saved on the blockchain) and complements the social-media layer of Hive for content creators: While for social media content the ability of having your content displayed censorship-resistant on many different frontends is great, Hive currently lacks a licensing layer. As a result of this, currently all content on Hive is handled by frontends as if it was public domain, which is a problem for content creators (who lose control of where their content is displayed and potentially harm the SEO of their own blog) and frontends alike (who potentially display user posts without having the license to do so).

Can't wait to travel again!

half of it is to technical for me :D i kinda understand what are you talking about but the details are lost to me :D

I don't think i could have a successful stand alone blog for travel as i don't travel enough, but i will test this option for sure when i get access to it.

From the video, setting up everything looks really easy.

Haha sorry for all the developer talk, just really excited to build this :D

You would be surprised, many of the top-ranking travel blogs are written by copywriters who have never been to the destination they write about..

You should be off the waitlist now, please let us know how you find it when you give it a try!

I don't think i could have a successful stand alone blog for travel as i don't travel enough

many of the top-ranking travel blogs are written by copywriters who have never been to the destination they write about

Plus, where you live is a travel destination for others! ;)

Excited to move my Wordpress site to TravelFeed! Wordpress and BlueHost has been such a headache my site is always down. This should make my website much smoother and faster. Yay!

That looks very easy, definitely going to try this :D Thanks guys!  

Awesome! Don't forget to join the waitlist so you can get access as soon as possible :)

I will check that, thank you!

Great job with this. I hope to set something up, just thinking about the best way to use it!

Oops. Just saw that post... But applied for sure💙

nice post

Excelente!! Qué hermoso viaje 😍