Airline Reviews is Up for an Upgrade

Over the past couple of weeks, we've set our interns on a quest to retrieve data for about 38,000 international flights. We're working on a structure to get really in depth data on all flights and allow our users to compare this information.

We've got a lot of work to do on this section, but we decided to release it anyway and let people try it and help us improve it. You can see it on our site now. It's a work in progress, but here's an image of what it should look like

Bookmark to iloho Button Available

Promote your site by adding an iloho bookmarking button to your articles.
Step 1: Copy and Paste the following code to wherever you'd like the button to go. (Most people add the button to the bottom of their story).

<script type="text/javascript">
iloho_url = "YOUR.LINKURL.HERE"; /* REPLACE WITH YOUR LINK URL. Default is the url of the current page */
iloho_title = "TITLE"; /* REPLACE WITH THE TITLE OF YOUR ARTICLE. Default is the html-title of the current page */
iloho_icon = "big"; /* OPTIONS: BIG | SMALL | TEXT . default is the big one */
</script>
<script src="http://www.iloho.com/tools/iloho_it.js" type="text/javascript"></script>


Step 2: Define the page that you would like the link on iloho.com to point to.
For example, if you've written a story, and that story is located at http://www.mysite.com/my-story, the code will look like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
iloho_url = "http://www.mysite.com/my-story";
</script>

Step 3 (optional): Give a default title to display on iloho.com.
For example, if you're story's title is "My Story", add this to your code:

<script type="text/javascript">
iloho_url = "http://www.mysite.com/my-story";
iloho_title = "My Story";
</script>

Step 4 (optional): Choose the type of button you'd like to display on your site.
iloho offers three different styles of button links:

Style 1 (default): [image]
<script type="text/javascript">
iloho_url = "http://www.mysite.com/my-story";
iloho_title = "My Story";
iloho_icon = "big";
</script>

Style 2: [image]
<script type="text/javascript">
iloho_url = "http://www.mysite.com/my-story";
iloho_title = "My Story";
iloho_icon = "small";
</script>
Style 3: [image]

<script type="text/javascript">
iloho_url = "http://www.mysite.com/my-story";
iloho_title = "My Story";
iloho_icon = "text";
</script>

iloho Travel Contest - Only 2 Weeks Left

These next two weeks, we'll be winding down the iloho contest, it ends on the 31st of this month. We still have a ton of unclaimed prizes. Here's the lowdown on what can be grabbed right now with practically no effort whatsoever:

1. A round trip ticket between Tokyo or Osaka and Hong Kong. That means you can fly either way. If you live in one of those cities, all you have to do is post an itinerary with Japan as the theme.
   What's an itinerary and how do I post it?
   First off, you register for iloho with a valid email address. Once you've registered and logged in, you navigate to the itineraries section and click "Create Itinerary". Now you just enter in a description of a trip (real or imagined). Enter some cities in Japan and write about your experience there OR just make up some trip that you would like to take.
2. At least 5000 miles on your airline of choice. That's like a quarter of a ticket anywhere domestically, and to win that you can just post a popular travel advice article.
   Does this mean I have to spend 5 hours writing a good article? Absolutely not, all you need to do is find a good article on the net and post the link to the article on iloho. The extent of the writing skills that you'll need are creating a decent title and a short description for a grand total of several minutes. If the article is voted to popular, which at this point means 15 votes for it, you'll win! No questions asked.
3. Cash, yes Moolah, Dough, or my personal favorite, Lootcakes...Up to $1000. If you have more than 15 friends, you're in contention. The cash goes out to the group with the most members in their group.
   Where do I sign up and what exactly do I do? Just register with iloho with your email address, create a group, shoot an email to your friends, telling them to join your group (they can register free accounts too). Right now, 21 people gets you the grand prize, but even you can win $500 too. I bet you could have a hell of a party...
4. A 1gig USB Key and iPod Speakers, why not if we're just giving them away? We're giving away 100, but we only have 64 people that have actually won anything.
   At this point if you post a link to an article you will win. I think that's all I need to say.
5. Come on everyone can use a T-shirt and a travel pillow... We have a thousand, but again, only 64 articles have been posted, so plenty to give away.

I must stress the following points:

1. No, we won't sell, giveaway, or spam your email address. We do have a newsletter, but you can opt out.
2. You don't have to pay for shipping, we've got it covered.
3. How do you get your prizes when you win?
   If you win, we'll notify you by email directing you to a secure server at iloho.com. If you have any questions about the security of this event, please feel free to email me at info@iloho.com. We'll never give out your address information or use it for any other purpose.
   

We Released Landmarks ahead of Schedule

Ok, that never happens from what I hear. I don't know how the dev team pulled it off, but we actually released a new feature ahead of schedule.

Check it out at www.iloho.com/landmarks

One of Our Favorite Posts - This Island is For Sale

We'd love to buy this and make it the official iloho island.
http://www.iloho.com/posts/244-Blue-Lagoon-Island-FOR-SALE-on-EBay

New Homepage Look

Last week we updated the homepage. We wanted to add a little more excitement to it:

1. Introduction Update - we thought it was a little too static, so we added some more color to it and a countdown to our beta 0.3. One of the cool things about us is that we'll constantly be releasing improvements to iloho so we wanted to show that off.
   
2. Contest Flash - The contest didn't stand out enough so we changed some of the typography in the contest flash, no biggy, but we hope people can now see it.
3. Contest Standings - We'll update these every week. We wanted people to know if they're going to win or not, so hopefully, this will attract visitors who want to win. Check it out every week to see the standings!
4. Top Posts - we changed this whole concept, we used to have the top groups and top itineraries on the right so people could see what's going on with the rest of the site, but we felt that this might be unnecessary, because people usually navigate to where they want to go. Here we changed the top posts to top all-time posts and we gave the articles a score instead of a static one to five count.

Here's the old homepage:

What we've been up to at iloho

It seems that we've been neglecting the blog here. We've been quite busy with getting iloho launched and we'd love for anyone that stumbles upon this blog to visit our site (www.iloho.com). Of course, we always want to hear feedback from people, good or bad (info@iloho.com).

That being said, we've spent some time before the launch designing a cool travel contest that runs till the end of August. Check out what you can win at http://www.iloho.com/static/contest.

After we launched on the 18th, the team has been busy with bug fixes, plus minor usability and cosmetic changes.

Three things happened right near launch day that were huge issues.

1. No one had a clue how to use the site so we had to add in a whole header explaining the site. Something we had planned for, but got lost in the commotion of launch.
2. We had a big issue with hotmail users not getting our emails, the emails didn't even go into a spam folder. We had to turn off verification for hotmail users.
3. We redesigned the entire itinerary section. It was a several step process that could be saved as draft, and although the draft idea was and is a good one which we still hope to implement, the UI was far too clunky to use, so we dropped it for a single page submission.
   

Since then, we've just been correcting small bugs, plus adding little visual things, my favorite was our new "lickable" search box. This week we're starting to move beyond bug fixes and add new features, which we will be doing constantly so stay tuned!