Link Trip Reports to the Calendar?

What are your thoughts in linking Trip Reports to your Calendar entries?

My first thought is that people wouldn't look for TR's by date, so it wouldn't be that useful.

But I am thinking of some other things we can do with linking "stuff" to trip reports.

I guess by thought is that perhaps Trip Reports should be more of a feature than a forum. Similar to how you treat news. Just thinking out loud.

It's interesting that you put it that way, because participation in news topics has skyrocketed ever since it was integrated into the forum. I suspected that may happen, but I'm really surprised at the difference in activity in there.

What if trip reports were linked to the parks' pages? If somebody's viewing a park's page they could see the most X recent trip reports linked from there.

That could allow for a standard naming convention for TRs which could then be listed out however you wanted. Like "SFMM - Aug 2, 2008 - Bob."

Yeah... I have thought about that. There are a growing number of things that I can think of that I'd like to be able to plug in to the forum, and I'm trying to get my head around and efficient way to do that. A "plug in" system of sorts.

Yeah, I like the idea of crosslinking things as much as possible.

(I'm sure I've said that to you before, Jeff. Just probably not in those exact words.)

Cool. There is a lot of opportunity for taking that data and putting into other outlets like Facebook or FriendFeed via RSS. Could generate more traffic back here.

Yeah, there are a lot of good uses for the data, many of which I haven't thought of. ACN uses our RSS feed to put headlines on the page, for example.

There are two tricks that I have to consider. The first is to create an architecture that isn't too custom. The forum app will change and evolve and live on many sites. Because of that, I can't change it too much or I can't update it because it's too tightly integrated with CB (the news forum is an example of that, which is not ideal). The second thing is to work the problem in a way that it doesn't crush performance. I'm very proud of how fast this site is compared to the old one, and I don't want to hose that.

Like I said, I have a lot of ideas, and solutions in mind, but I need to find the time to act on them. It's a little harder now that I'm back into a day job. :)

It would be a nice idea if it could actually bolster the use of the calendar function. I looked in the calendar shortly before the conversion and I saw very few entries, yet I still see posts asking if people are going to be at park X on Y weekend.

I really think the calendar is underutilized. It could be used to really become a "community" where we would be able to meet up more with other buzzers at other parks. If marrying the functionality of the trip report to the calendar creates more calendar usage, I'm all for it. :)

Agreed. The calendar is just a great idea away from being something really useful.

Adding recent/upcoming visits to our profiles based on calendar useage was a good start. Not sure what exactly would push it over the top, but it's always felt *this close* to being a breakout tool.

A TR title standard would be awesome. The current calendar could go and I wouldn't care. But the ability to view TR's by date or location could be interesting.