Have you ever found yourself with the mammoth task of planning your next trip? You're going somewhere, maybe through business or just through pleasure - maybe you've just finished University and you are going to do a round the world trip but have no idea how that trip will take form.

Maybe you know exactly where you are going.. but you don't know what to do with your 2 days there or maybe you are going travelling for a few weeks and want some inspiration for nearby places to explore. I have found myself in this situation various times. For instance back in 2007 I had a flight from/to Bangkok, 7 weeks and wanted to go to Vietnam, however didn't know how and where I'd be going to do this after much painful reading of books such as Lonely Planet and Rough Guides I came to the conclusion that I might as well go to the countries of Cambodia and Laos since they were on the way. However, then it was a case of logistics - what was I going to do in those countries? where was I going to go? where would I stay? How was I going to get from A to B?

Luckily it seems the web can help here. WikiTravel is a website rich on Lonely Planet style content with the added benefit of hyperlinks which allow a computer to easily make associations of various places. For instance if you go to a location page you will find links to nearby places in the Getting There/Away section and links to districts of the location. However it can be quite overwhelming reading through WikiTravel just as it can be in a travel guide as so many of the pages you read through although related can be found in various locations in the book and without good long analysis it can be tricky to work out that for example Singapore is right next to Borneo and you could consider a little excursion there while you are away.

So it was with this thought that I have created "The Web is Your Oyster" - it starts off as one single html file that you can place on a usb stick, it then grows as you pull down information and map images from the web on the fly and add your own personal notes about plans and reservations so come the time for your holiday you can take that same usb stick with you and read it on the plane, or on the move in your destination where internet may not be readily available to you or very expensive with data roaming charges.

So this was the basis for the demo/proof of concept I will now be sharing with you. I must firstly make the comment that this works best on an Apple Mac. The main problem that still needs to be addressed is saving images locally via javascript. I have not seen evidence of this working in Internet Explorer yet. The main functionality this loses is the ability to cache maps as you view them, however you can download tiles manually to make the data offline.

So step one is to plant the seed - you tell it where you are going and how many days. In this example we will go to Singapore for 10 days which will fire off a google local search request.


The page will then visibly begin flashing as it pulls down pages from WikiTravel for offline use. It will also pull down an GeoRSS feed from Flickr to add some inspiration.

The result is the map above will now be centered on Singapore with lots of clickable geotags.


It will also create a timeline in the menu to the right of your map with the 10 days we gave it waiting for input.



We can click on these and add notes such as flight times and logistics as we find them by clicking on these notes and editing them.


Just as you would be able to with Google Maps you can then pan and zoom around the map, as it does this it will try to pull down image tiles so that in future no web connection will be needed. You can click on the maps and explore the data it pulled from the web -for instance the wikitravel article on Little India in Singapore below and edit it to cut down bits that don't interest you personally.



As you read articles you dislike you can press delete in the top right of the note to remove them from your itinerary.

You can then enrich it further by tagging specific locations. So for instance, say I was lucky enough to get a reservation at Raffles hotel I could put a tag on the map for it.



I can then click this newly created tag and add notes to it there and then.


There are lots of other features you may care to try - you can add tags to the map using your mouse by holding shift and clicking the left mouse button on a point in the map. Also you can search your content, and focus the map on geotagged notes using the "go here" button which you will find next to the creation date underneath the note title (see image above for example).




There's lot of work to be done (as I said it's a proof of concept), and I'm sure lots of people will have views on what websites it should use for it's data, and other cool ideas about how it should work. Please fire me with any comments you have good or
bad - I'm keen to hear them! To see it in action: take a look at Singapore Web Is Your Oyster example used in this post. Then try it for yourself! Right click and save to download and try The Web Is Your Oyster - don't try using it online - you won't get the same experience!

Interested in the code? Check out: the svn code for the web is your oyster