David Sifry's dashboard

I'm seeing the same problem with my MX300. Anyone have a fix for this?

Not quite yet, but that is a well-requested feature! I'll pass it on to the product team...

Dave

The easiest way is to buy your book. Then you can always go back to it, add/remove and customize it right from your "My Stuff" link on any page on the site.

Joven,

Whoops! Talk about embarassing. Sorry about that! That's definitely a bug. We've fixed the Athens image. One of the feature requests we get is whether we'll also allow users to select a photo for the cover, and I really appreciate your opinion. We're still a pretty small team, so I can't commit to any dates, but it is certainly something that makes a lot of sense.

Dave

Liz,

This is a great question. We've been working on the issues you mentioned - some are resolved, and some are still outstanding at this time, so let me give you an update:

1) Your line breaks should now stay in the guide, sorry about that!
2) We're working on a system that will allow HTML formattng, but we had a problem where some cut-and-pasted HTML would cause issues when building PDFs. Rather than leave an unpredictable feature in the product, we decided to take out all HTML formatting for now until we get the core issues resolved. Sorry about that!
3) We're working on a service that will let you preview what the formatted custom chapters will actually look like in a book. No firm ETA on that, but it is definitely in the works.
4) Unfortunately we can't easily take a PDF that you already have and squeeze it into a book, it creates a bunch of formatting issues, especially with margins, bleeds, and flows. My suggestion at this time would be for you to select the text from the PDF, copy it into your clipboard, and then paste it into the custom chapter field. It'll reformat, but all the information will be there.
5) When you download your PDF, your custom chapters should appear. You may find it needs a bit of reformatting this time around (sorry!) but once you've fixed it once, you shouldn't have to do it again.

If you don't see your custom chapters printed in your PDFs in the future, then that's a major bug, please let us know - but I think you'll find them there...

Thanks for using Offbeat Guides, and for your great feedback on our beta!

Dave

Great! All of the changes that we discussed are now live on the site. Many thanks for your feedback and comments!

Dave

I totally agree. We've been focusing 100% on getting the core service working and reliable, and multi-segment trips (multiple destinations) is something that we'll get to as soon as the core is really working at a high quality, hopefully sometime early next year!

Dave

Kari,

We're so sorry abut that! It is indeed a bug in our Thailand guides, and we're working on a fix for it. In the meantime, I've sent you a standalone map of Phuket that (I hope) will make up for our error. Sorry about that!

Dave

Dawn,

You're absolutely right - we don't currently have guides for regional destinations like Jamaica, or Hawaii or the Napa Valley. To this point, we've been focusing on city destinations, so that's why you'll find a guide for Kingston, Jamaica, but not for Jamaica itself. However, getting regional guides into the system is a priority for us, something that we'lre hoping to have ready in the beginning of next year.

Sorry that I couldn't give you a better solution, but please do know that we're working on this, it's a known issue. Thanks for your great comments and feedback. If you'd like, we can send you an email when we start rolling out regional guides, let me know...

Dave

Earle,

Thanks for spending time on this and giving us some advice on suggested methods of attribution. Making sure that we are following both the letter and the spirit of the license is very important to us at Offbeat Guides, and it has always been our intent to do the right thing and give proper attribution, and to share changes and improvements with the rest of the wikitravel community. We currently have 3 people whose jobs include editing, curating, and improving Wikitravel articles, for example.

The References section is non-optional, and we're going to make sure that there is no checkbox on that area in the web interface - rest assured that it shows up on the web site, in the PDFs and in the printed books, no matter what is clicked on today, but we will make sure to fix the bug in the web interface to emphasize the fact that this is a non-optional section.

I like your suggestion of wording of the attribution paragraph - our goal has always been to provide references to make it easy for people to find their way back Wikitravel for the articles we use, so we'll make some changes in the next release cycle to revise the way we provide attribution. Your mention of the specific CC license text is also correct, we'll add that in.

Our lawyers are revising the ToS to make sure that we're much clearer about the language we use, and the copyright we assert. Please note that the guides are covered under Copyright, in particular as a collection. As such, it is entirely appropriate to have the copyright mark in our Terms of Service, while still respecting the individual copyrights of the authors of the various parts of our books.

With regards to maps and other items in our books, we have separate, private relationships with various vendors and providers of proprietary information as well, so while I appreciate your concern, we are working directly with our partners on these matters.

Thanks for your concern and your great suggestions!

Dave

Liz,

What you're seeing is an indication of a bug on our end. It should only take a few minutes (10 or 15 at most) but something seems to be going wrong. Our engineering team is looking into it, and we'll get back to you shortly.

Can you let us know your origin and your destination? That'll help us to debug things. If you'd like, you can email that information to info@offbeatguides.com as well.