News - Aussie Bushwalking

Facebook integration now live

2011-09-10T23:00:00Z

Well it's taken awhile, but the next phase of the Aussie Bushwalking->Facebook integration is finally live. It's been a busy time at ABW Headquarters (AKA my home) but I've been working on it bit by bit over the last couple of months.

This new feature lets you have ABW post directly to your Facebook wall when you tick off a walk. So you end up with something like this:

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You can connect your ABW to Facebook from your profile page. Just select "My Profile" from the top menu then "Connect to Facebook" from the left hand menu and follow the instructions.

This feature was the most popular on our feedback site. Now it's time to move onto something else. Head over there now and add your own ideas now!

Tell Me What To Do!

2011-07-01T23:00:00Z

I've always wanted Aussie Bushwalking to meet the needs of the users and now UserVoice will help that happen. I've opened a UserVoice account at http://abw.uservoice.com/ to let users submit feature ideas and vote on what they'd most like to see added to the site.

I've deliberately left the list empty for the moment, even though I already have some ideas which people have sent me. I'm interested to see what turns up so head over, add some ideas and vote on which ones you'd like to see the most. I make no promises, but I do promise to take this list into account when I'm planning what to work on next.

Featured Site - Bushwalking NSW

2011-06-20T23:00:00Z

About time to feature another site. This time around it's Bushwalking NSW. This site actually has some similar goals to Aussie Bushwalking, but concentrates on New South Wales. This is great for ABW users, because at the moment we've only got 9 NSW walks, and most of those are near the QLD border!

The site contains a good set of walks with comprehensive notes and photos. It also includes guide book reviews, a custom grading system and track notes from the author, Tom Brennan. According to the site it's been running since 2002 and has updates from throughout that period, which shows that Tom has got the commitment to provide back to the bushwalking community.

So... if you're a New South Wales bushwalker looking for ideas, check it out. But of course, once you've done a walk come back to Aussie Bushwalking, add some notes and tick it off in your profile ;)

Open Street Maps Added

2011-05-28T23:00:00Z

As promised, even though mapping was only just added to Aussie Bushwalking I haven't been sitting around doing nothing. One thing you find pretty quickly is that each of the mapping platforms have different strengths and weaknesses. I've used Bing Maps as the base platform for the maps at Aussie Bushwalking for a variety of reasons. One of those is that their licensing allows for me to bring in the excellent OpenStreetMap data... so that's what I've done!

OpenStreetMaps is a collaborative effort, much like ABW itself. As such, the data quality differs from place to place. If you look around the Mt Barney area you'll see that a lot of the specific mountain peaks have already been supplied, as well as many of the walking tracks. Unfortunately looking along Main Range National Park only a couple of the peaks are available.

In the end, this doesn't matter since ABW offers both Bing Maps and OpenStreetMap. Now on any map just pull down the map type option (in the toolbar at the top of the map) and choose OpenStreetMap to get an alternate view. I find it's often a good way of finding exactly where to put the location of a walk.

Now to just find a source of topographic maps...

Featured Site - Hike-Australia

2011-05-26T23:00:00Z

Aussie Bushwalking is all about sharing bushwalking info with each other. That means we like any info, whether it's on Aussie Bushwalking or another site. Hike-Australia is one of the many great bushwalking sites out there.

Much like ABW, Hike-Australia hopes to gather together details of walks all over Australia. It's run by Ben, a man who seems to have an eerily similar background to myself. We're both ex-Scouts who left after Venturers, but never lost the love of the bush; though it appears he manages to actually walk far more often than myself.

Ben has enlisted the help of some friends and has come up with a pile of great articles including hiking guides & reviews, gear reviews, recipes and general how-tos. There's a wealth of info on there and I haven't made it through all of it yet but the content I've read so far is very high quality. The walks are currently focused on Victoria, a state which isn't covered much by ABW yet.

And of course, the best part is Ben has started contributing to ABW as well. His first walk, Lerderderg Gorge River return via Cowan Track, went up a week or so ago and he plans on adding more. This is great, particularly since he's not in the South-East Queensland area which seems to be the hot spot for ABW contributors.

I've thrown Hike-Australia on the Other Websites article over on ABW. Please login and add sites that you've found helpful on that page. I'm going to aim to highlight a few that I find particularly good on this news page.

Bringing Maps to Aussie Bushwalking

2011-05-16T23:00:00Z

The most popular feature request by a long stretch for Aussie Bushwalking has been to add mapping support. Who wants to browse through pages of regions and walk descriptions when you could just zoom in on your house and find the closest walk! Let alone that not everybody has memorised the name of every National Park within a day's drive.

So... I'm happy to announce I've just released the first version of the ABW mapping support. You can now associate a location when you add or edit a walk. This is used to show the walks on the main Walks page.

Obviously, we have lots of walks already on the site which don't have locations so they won't appear on the map. I'll be spending some time adding the details for what I can, but hopefully a few others will join in as well. Just go to a walk you know about, hit the edit button and double click on the map to set the location. (You can also type in the longitude/latitude if you'd prefer...)

I still have plenty of plans for the map, this is simply version 1. Next up is to add some filtering features so you can specify how difficult or long a walk you are looking for. And of course, eventually I'd like to be able to upload GPS tracks and show them on the map. Hopefully this will make it easier for people to find the right walk and get out there hiking!

Welcome to Aussie Bushwalking News

2011-05-03T23:00:00Z

Aussie Bushwalking is on the move. Over the last few months I've done a complete rewrite of the site to clean it up and prepare it for some new features. This update has been running for a few weeks now and seems to be well received.

Now the Aussie Bushwalking News page is up and running. You can see news summaries on the front page or all the details here on the News page. You can also follow us using your favourite feed reader. Hopefully this will let us keep you up to date with what we're working on.

So please leave a comment and say g'day. I'm already working on the next big feature for the site, one that's been requested by MANY people (more on that sometime soon). Hopefully the updates will be much more frequent than they have been in the last few months.