Blog Off The Cuff

Blog Off The Cuff  is the official blog of Travel Off The Cuff.

Travel Off The Cuff is a community-driven travel news site. The site was designed to make it easy to stay up to date on the latest travel news while discovering new and exciting travel blog posts. Each day, there are thousands of professional and independent travellers writing about their experiences in both far away and next door exotic locations. Travel Off The Cuff is your hub for finding the best of the stories. We are also the first news aggregation site with the ability to geotag stories. When you view more info about a particular story, you’ll see a sampling of other stories we’ve had around the same area as well. It’s really cool.

You Help Make The News

Your participation here is important in helping to make sure the best travel stories get noticed. There are a several ways to help out… If you use Firefox or Safari, use our First Class Submit link (You can find it on our News page). With the First Class Submit link in your toolbar, you’ll be able to easily submit any travel story without leaving that page.

Who Runs This Thing?

The site was conceived, designed and operated by Mark Wolinski. We do not have any outside investors, nor are we controlled by a large faceless corporation. The influence for the site came from other news aggregation sites out there. While they all had travel sections, you were inundated with stories in tech, politics or NSFW images. I wanted a place that was focused specifically on travel news and stories. The site is a conglomerate of WordPress (user management), Tumblr (Blog) and my own development.

You’ll also notice that I post a majority of the stories on the site. Every story is individually posted to the site. I didn’t build an RSS scraper app (although I could have, had one built for another site I had years ago). In fact, it’d be impossible to do what the site does with an RSS scraper since each story has a thumbnail and is Geotagged.

Over the course of a day, I may go through over 300 stories but only post about 50 of them. When I’m posting, I’m looking for stories that are interesting and well thought out. I also tend to only post stories that have content to them and aren’t quick one-off paragraphs. And confidentially between you and me, that’s why the submission method keeps getting easier and faster to use. I eat my own dog food here. Of course, as the number of users and user submitted stories increases, I’ll decrease my submissions. The goal is to be true community-driven.

Do You Edit?

No and Yes. If a story is somewhere in the travel sphere, I have no problems with it being on the site. However, if it is clearly unrelated to travel and by all accounts spam, I will remove it. Realize, there is a big gray area there and I tend to lean towards letting the story be on the site. If there are legal issues involved, I’ll pick the best course of action that results in me not getting sued. Of course, as the community builds, so will the tools for the community to remove spam from the listings, if needed. Also, because the First Class submit link grabs the title of the page, I do try to remove the site name from the title before submitting, just so the listings are cleaner.

Do you need help?

Yes, gobs of it. But since I’m not making money from the site, I can’t pay anyone. However, if anyone is interested in doing some pro-bono work, contact me and we can talk. What am I looking for? People who are intimate with PHP, Zend Framework and/or iPhone development.

Wait, I have more questions!

I’ll be glad to answer your questions, just use the Contact link in the header of the News page and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.