Show HN: The most beautiful places on earth

by thlt • 14 years ago

85 49 14 years ago

mwilcox• 14 years ago

thlt16• 14 years ago

it is different in many terms like mostbeautifulplaces.org focuses on the true beauty of that place, that's it. Also it is crowd-sourced, meaning that any one from all over the world can help discover great places on earth.

steve8918• 14 years ago

Nice, but you should change the rectangular boxes to rounded corners, the corners look harsh and ugly.

Also, there's a distance underneath the link, but I have no idea what it means nor how to change it.

thlt16• 14 years ago

yeah it's pretty useless, I'll change it to district and country where the place belongs to.

Caerus• 14 years ago

The distances are relative to a blue marker on the map, which you can drag to your current location. For me, it was in the UK and completely hidden by one of the boxes. I just happened to notice it during the refresh after manipulating the map.

superphil0• 14 years ago

kilometers too pls :)

nyellin• 14 years ago

Namely:

  .overlay-label {
    border-radius: 5px;
  }

thlt16• 14 years ago

lol you guys seriously hate hard corners, i don't think there is anything wrong with it.

thlt16• 14 years ago

hmnn indeed looks better. Updated. Thanks.

japhyr• 14 years ago

I just found a place I'd like to visit. I saw "Valley of the Ten Peaks" in Canada. I visited Lake Louise on a road trip, but did not make it up to Moraine Lake. This makes me want to go back.

How will you keep the map from getting too crowded?

thlt16• 14 years ago

We cluster them as how http://cravify.com works.

jawr• 14 years ago

both are awesome sites. good work!

rokhayakebe• 14 years ago

What makes a place beautiful? Is it the location or the scenery? If it is the former than your website design should is spot on. If the latter than you should get rid of the map as the helm and show users a beautiful grid of images with location info at the bottom.

thlt16• 14 years ago

I bet both location and scenery are important as you'll consider where to visit first. Wouldn't it great to know somewhere is very beautiful and just close to you ? It is also very helpful when you travel as you don't want to miss any beautiful places near your destinations.

reubensutton• 14 years ago

This is a really cool idea, it would be nice if you worked out a way for the boxes to not overlap though.

Where did you get your initial dataset from?

thlt16• 14 years ago

Hi thanks, we have collected data from different sources for bootstrapping.

conanite• 14 years ago

Using safari (5.1.5) on mac, I can't click on any of the place links (works ok in chrome)

thlt16• 14 years ago

hi thanks for the report, I'll investigate the issue soon.

Swizec2• 14 years ago

I want to share this on twitter and attribute it properly, but you don't share your twitter handle anywhere on the site, or in your HN profile ...

Why don't people mention who they are when they make something awesome?

thlt16• 14 years ago

hey the site is made by @cravify :)

simonbrown• 14 years ago

Speaking generally, surely having a link to the site is attribution?

Swizec2• 14 years ago

It's not the same. Attaching a person to the link is a much "warmer" referral/introduction/what-you-want-to-call-it than just linking to a site.

MattJ100• 14 years ago

You're assuming they have a Twitter account.

morsch2• 14 years ago

Hmm. You are only supposed to add pictures for new places. What happens when the first picture added along with a new place is beautiful, but much more beautiful photos exist? Worse yet, what if more representative photos exist?

E.g. arguably Mont Saint-Michel is a good candidate (in a similar vein as Mdina/Malta). I've got a nice, prototypical photo of Mont Saint-Michel, but I'm sure much, much better photos would be added -- the light was only okay, there are people in the photo, my camera back then wasn't the greatest. I've also got an image from within/on top of Mont Saint-Michel, which is also nice, but arguably the photo chosen to represent Mont Saint-Michel should be the classic "long shot" of the entire mountain/city/church.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Saint-Michel

In the spirit of the site itself, maybe a community process could manage existing places. E.g. a regular contest/vote for a better photo or simply a wiki. And of course these are issues that only crop up when and if the site takes off, so they don't need to be solved for the first iteration. Although it does pose a problem even now, since I feel apprehensive about adding any of my images since I don't want to prevent anybody else from adding theirs!

thlt16• 14 years ago

yeah this is in the plan. There should be no limitation in order to get better.

morsch2• 14 years ago

Heh, good thing I didn't add my Mont Saint-Michel photo, since it doesn't remotely compare to the one someone added in the intervening 8 hours: http://mostbeautifulplaces.org/item/5291532

Too bad the images aren't available in a higher res, btw.

adrianwaj• 14 years ago

It would indeed be a tragedy if Fukushima reactor 4 collapses. http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/06/01/fukushima-nuclea...

It already is a tragedy.

newobj• 14 years ago

Brutal on mobile.

thlt16• 14 years ago

yup not mobile friendly yet :)

timrobinson• 14 years ago

I'm on an iPad and I can't make any of the links work.

afterburner• 14 years ago

Looks really cluttered, despite not having a lot up yet. Maybe have the boxes expand when the cursor is near?

whichdan• 14 years ago

I agree. I think a transparent box with just the name would be great, and then when you mouseover/click, it would open a tooltip similar to PadMapper. Right now the distance and thumbnail don't really add much to the initial tooltip.

It would be great if each location had several pictures, and info on how to travel there & other nearby attractions. For instance, maybe it could open a link to HipMunk with the nearest airport already filled in, or it could just tell you airline prices directly. Do that, add a few hundred more locations, and this would actually be a really really cool site.

thlt16• 14 years ago

hi, thanks for the great ideas.

ThomPete2• 14 years ago

I wonder why we don't see more map apps like this.

Just of the top of my head:

Around the world route maps (people submit the trips they did)

Greatest explorers route maps (although I guess there might be some problems with historical accuracy)

Geek Spots Around the world

Known Military Bases around the world (and perhaps a strategy game on top)

The use of large scale maps are IMHO still a very underutilized area because most go for the location based stuff.

Ogre• 14 years ago

I was sure I'd seen the Geek Spots one on HN before, so here, I found it: http://nerdydaytrips.com/

Also though in tracking that down, I found this enormous (2300+!) catalog of Google Maps mashups:

http://www.programmableweb.com/api/google-maps/mashups

nosignal• 14 years ago

Thanks for that mashup link, I'm always on the lookout for web map references so that's pretty useful. Cheers.

ThomPete2• 14 years ago

Oh wow cool

aw3c2• 14 years ago

Using content from Wikipedia without kind of attribution is not cool and not legal. All the descriptions seem to be verbatim copies. Boo!

thlt16• 14 years ago

Yeah all the content is from Wikipedia. Some very first places were not attributed properly, the newest ones are. We'll fix them soon. Thanks for the feedback.

rickard• 14 years ago

How come Christ Church Meadow, Oxford, is also in Venice? See http://mostbeautifulplaces.org/item/5291686 vs http://mostbeautifulplaces.org/item/5291685 ... Hackish indeed... ;-)

thlt16• 14 years ago

ooop how come there was such a mistake hmnnn. The Venice one is replaced by the correct one now.

antihero• 14 years ago

You should make sure that the photos pass some sort of test for quality and resolution. I want to see photos that make stuff look truly beautiful.

thlt16• 14 years ago

yeah we manually review them all.

yureka• 14 years ago

Good stuff!

I just added two new places (Niagara Falls and Yosemite Falls). I'm hoping for this to catch on, that way It can help me plan my US-West_Coast trip in a few months :D

thlt16• 14 years ago

thanks, they are awesome places ;)

pthreads• 14 years ago

So needed. Thanks.

albertzeyer• 14 years ago

Reminds me a bit of http://www.where-is-this.com/. Also a collection of very nice places.

DIVx0• 14 years ago

You have badlands national park located near Minneapolis MN. I don't know if this was meant to be a joke or not but you're off by several hundred miles.

PidGin128• 14 years ago

The social media bar is interfering somehow on chrome 21.0.1157.0 (Developer Build 139621 Windows) (with plugins set to click enable) and 1024*768 screen on xp.

Mainly, all the page under the bar is blank. this affects where the overview map thinks the center is, when you double click to zoom in. also, made the individual site pages uselessly narrow.

edit: deleting this node "<div id="share_btns" class="panel">" makes it usable.

Show HN: The most beautiful places on earth

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