Ride with GPS Blog

New video: Tanita BC-1000 Body Composition Monitor

2011-11-07T00:00:00-08:00

We now support syncing with weight/body composition data, and displaying it in the Activity Center. You can get this data with a Tanita BC-1000 Body Composition Monitor, which is a scale that will do a wireless sync with a handful of Garmin GPS units, as well as an Ant+ USB stick plugged into your computer.

New video: Maintenance Logs

2011-11-07T00:00:00-08:00

You can plan and track all of your maintenance within Ride with GPS. Check out this quick demonstration of these features.

New video: Laps and Splits

2011-10-21T00:00:00-07:00

We’re excited to release initial support for laps and splits, and this video walks you through everything you can currently do with this feature as a premium user.

New video: Garmin Write

2011-10-21T00:00:00-07:00

Getting routes on your Garmin GPS unit has been made even easier for premium users. Just click “Garmin Write” and wait a moment. Watch this video to see how it works.

New video: Deleting control points

2011-10-21T00:00:00-07:00

We’ve had many questions about how to delete control points, and doing so is fast and easy, but a bit unintuitive the first time. We’ll work on making it more intuitive, but in the meantime here is a video showing you how to remove control points while planning or editing a route.

New video: Copy and edit a route

2011-07-19T00:00:00-07:00

Another video on route editing, this quick demo shows copying someone else’s route and performing edits on the cuesheet, POIs, and track.

New video: Using control points

2011-07-08T00:00:00-07:00

We have had a lot of questions about editing routes. Here is a demo of how to use control points to adjust your route while planning or editing.

New video: Adding custom cue sheet entry

2011-07-07T00:00:00-07:00

We’ve been busy fixing bugs and getting our 2.0 release stable and working well. Here is a quick demo of adding custom cue sheet entries:

Ride with GPS version 2.0 released

2011-07-02T00:00:00-07:00

We are excited to announce a significant milestone for us, the 2.0 release of ridewithgps.com.

Here is a brief overview of the changes:

The route planner and viewer has been rewritten from the ground up, and no longer uses Flash.
All uploaded file processing has been rewritten, resulting in more comprehensive support for the many variations of GPX and other file types.
New base layer options in the maps, including OSM maps and several topo maps (available in the top right of the map).
Entire site internationalized. This means we will be able to translate the site into other languages, and localize dates.
We touched everything and are in a much better position moving forward.
During this process we also expanded our server infrastructure. We have redundancy everywhere, room for lots of growth, and moving forward plan to be rock-solid stable and faster than ever.
The format and storage backend for all route and GPS data has completely changed to be faster and better suited for significant growth.

The release process was fairly complex, and a bit bumpy. We stayed up all night Thursday night trying to get non-latin characters displaying correctly, and fixed a number of bugs Friday and today. Our new route planner is a bit slow in IE 7 and 8, and to those users we highly recommend the Google Chrome Frame, an easy-to-install addon that uses the fantastic Chrome engine inside of IE. This means you don’t have to switch away from IE to a different browser, and you get the primary benefits of using Google Chrome. This will speed up all of your web browsing if you are an IE user - especially viewing and planning routes on our site. That being said, performance is one of our foremost concerns. We want our site to be as fast as possible, so we will continue improving performance in the new planner.

To all the users who have contacted us over the past few days, with frustrations, congratulations, and bug reports: thank you! Your feedback has been invaluable.

If you have any feedback for us - feature ideas, bugs, or just want to chat - don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can reach us at info@ridewithgps.com or by clicking the Feedback link on ridewithgps.com.

Instructions for Edge 305, 500, 705 and 800 now posted

2011-04-07T00:00:00-07:00

I finally got around to writing up some detailed information about how to use a Garmin Edge series GPS bike computer for navigating a route plotted using our bike route planner – I compiled help articles for each of the popular Edge series bike computers. You can now understand which file format is the best for turn by turn navigation on your particular GPS unit.

Instructions for
- Edge 305
- Edge 500
- Edge 605
- Edge 705
- Edge 800

The Edge 305/500 articles are works in progress. I will continue to improve the information in the articles with more detailed instructions, including pictures, in the coming weeks.

Additionally, if you don’t have City Navigator maps for your 605/705/800, I have provided instructions for downloading the excellent Open Street Map files for use as the base map on these devices. Enjoy!

Initial Premium Account Launch

2011-03-30T00:00:00-07:00

Finally, after months of delay we have “soft launched” our premium accounts. They are not fully functional yet, but we decided to take a leap and release them into the wild. They have replaced our old donation system. Don’t expect miracles if you sign up for a premium account (yet). There are some extra features like PDF cuesheet printing and better map printing, as well as access to our new Activity Center (a new way to manage your activities) however things remain a bit sparse. Within the next month we will release several new features such as an enhanced export for training purposes as well as direct write to Garmin Devices.

Additionally, anyone signing up for a premium account receives new features automatically. Phone support is also provided. If you are on the fence, feel free to wait a few weeks and see what we release!

Signup for a premium account!

Garmin Communicator and IE9

2011-03-30T00:00:00-07:00

With the recent release of IE9, I soon found out that users attempting to use Garmin Sync with IE9 were having trouble. We have implemented a fix, and everything seems to be working well now. Sorry for the hassle, but thanks for letting us know!

Full speed ahead: Motorcycle-USA, JS Route planner, beta updates

2011-02-22T00:00:00-08:00

Motorcycle-USA integration launched!

We worked with Motorcycle USA a while back to develop an integration so their users could search for and check out routes within their site. They recently launched it, check it out if you’re interested: Motorcycle Ride Guide

New route planner and viewer

Currently we are working on a Javascript-based route planner and viewer. This means that there will no longer be anything in the way of our tools working on iPhones and iPads. The most significant impact will be that route editing will work great! This is the most important consideration in launching this work, because currently route editing is limited to fairly simple modifications. We want our route planning and viewing tools to be rock solid, bug free, and easy for us to extend and maintain. That is the goal with this work, and we are currently ahead of schedule and very happy with where this is going. Expect a new route planner and viewer before April.

Don’t worry – you will not have to learn something new. We believe that much of what we have done we have done right: elevation live updating and right there for you to see and interact with, easy and fast click-to-draw routes, and an interface that gets uses your browser window space as effectively as possible. The main impact you will see from this work once it is released are some performance improvements and added features, such as adding photos to your cuesheet entries and points of interest.

Beta continues with addition of Activity Center

Our beta is continuing and currently includes the printing of custom maps and cue sheets, and that recent addition of the Activity Center. We are going to be improving these features and working out the bugs as quickly as we can in order to get them out on our site for everyone to use.

Final thoughts

We have been working incredibly hard and will continue to do so… now at an accelerated pace. Please let us know if you have any concerns or questions. I wrote this quick post up because someone just reminded me that our blog has not been updated in a while – any feedback is appreciated and does have an impact!

Garmin Connect moves to Bing maps

2010-11-19T00:00:00-08:00

Garmin Connect just recently moved to Bing based maps, and spurred a huge outcry from their userbase. The topic on Garmin’s forum has racked up a total of twelve pages today alone with many negative comments, including many people talking about how they will be moving on to other sites. Zack and I just want to say welcome to any Garmin Connect users looking for an innovative, customer centric free website dedicated to being the best way to log bike rides

Please, feel free to signup and give some suggestions for us. We love talking with our users and are happy to have you on our service!

Interesting calorie tracking site

2010-03-01T00:00:00-08:00

This isn’t directly Ride With GPS related, however I thought this calorie tracking website was a cool idea:

http://janeme.com

We have been thinking about how to best let users track their caloric intake and expenditure and the Jane Me folks have presented a neat model. It will be cool to see how their service evolves and I wish them well!

New issue page!

2010-02-26T00:00:00-08:00

We are happy to finally rollout a page where users can submit issues, suggestions and feature requests. The issues are public and can be voted and commented on. Voting will allow us to better prioritize requests. Additionally, it will provide a way for users to discuss issues or features, further helping craft the site into something people can feel involved in and proud of. The old feedback submission form is still functional, however we advise people to use the new issues page so that managing bug reports and feature requests is more efficient for our team.

Thanks for helping make our site great!

Fixed save functionality on route planner

2010-02-26T00:00:00-08:00

Some users were experiencing issues saving routes. It turns out the issue was with some versions of the Firefox web browser under Windows. Took me a while to hunt down, but it is fixed. We are sorry for the inconvenience this caused some users.

From 1.0 to 1.0.5, and What's Next

2009-11-22T00:00:00-08:00

Since our 1.0 release, Ride with GPS has been moving forward rapidly. We have received hundreds of suggestions and have been working hard to address bugs, improve usability, and build out important features. We opened up an application to join our beta program last month, and were pleased to receive several hundred submissions. This program will begin on December 1st, and we will be rolling features out to small groups of users in order to refine our upcoming training features quickly.

We have begun having scheduled releases in order to better handle suggestions, and more accurately let you know when things will be available. This is helping us stay organized and deliver features at predictable times. If you want to see our progress, you can always check out the changelog by clicking on the version at the top of the page. Right now it is 1.0.5, and clicking that will take you to a page that has a detailed list of everything that changes between each version. In this most recent release, most notably we have finally come out with time zone support (edit your settings to change your time zone), and the ability to upload as many TCX/GPX/KML files as you want at once! Just select them all, and see progress bars as they upload. Very easy and pleasant to use.

If you have a Garmin GPS unit though, there is no longer any need to get your data off with 3rd party software! Recently, we have released the Garmin Sync feature which allows you to directly sync your most recent rides from your Garmin GPS unit with our site. We are using this as an opportunity to kick off a series of video tutorials that will walk you through using our site to accomplish various things. If you have any suggestions for videos to make, let us know!

Subscribe to our Youtube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/ridewithgps (or just check out our first video below)

Reliability Issues Fixed

2009-11-12T00:00:00-08:00

Some of you may have noticed some reliability issues over the last two days. This was due to a package we use in background processing of certain items (your uploaded trips, creating the map images you see around the site) having a couple issues with how we were using it. I am happy to say that after spending 20 or so hours fixing some stuff, things should be much more stable!

If you see any reliability issues, please let us know as usual. A little delay in processing your uploaded file, or before a map image is created is normal, but if you see anything pushing past a few minutes give us an email. Also, re-uploading your TCX/GPX/KML files in this situation will just make duplicates :) You will know we are working on processing your file by the message on your profile page.

Version 1.0: Complete redesign, new features, new team member

2009-09-26T00:00:00-07:00

We just released a set of bug fixes and minor feature enhancements on top of our new redesign built with our new partner, Cameron Gaut! We have also opened up a form to apply to join our private beta, where you will be able to check out our premium features before they are released, and hopefully help us by providing feedback. By iterating through a couple releases with our beta group before going public with these training and ride analysis features, we will come out of this with our best set of features yet.

Here are the details:

Ride with GPS Newsletter, Volume 1!
Apply to take part in our premium features beta test
Changelog: Get here by clicking the version number at the top of Ride with GPS. It shows all the changes as we release them so you know what’s new.

Lastly, for the social media users out there, you should follow us on twitter here.

Improvements almost here!

2009-08-15T00:00:00-07:00

As some of you are aware, we have been hard at work on a large number of improvements to the site. We have brought a good friend of ours on board, Cameron Gaut, and he has crafted up a great new look and feel to the site. We’re in the process of wrapping up these changes now, and we are almost there.

Expect the new version of this site to come online in the next couple of days. Once it is live, please send us your feedback through the Ideas? link at the top of the page. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the improvements.

Better international support, nice Facebook links, etc.

2009-07-02T00:00:00-07:00

Quick and dirty summary of what we have going on: new user signup form is friendly for users outside the US. Existing users can edit their profile and set a specific latitude and longitude, using a map, to automatically zoom to when drawing a new route. Routes outside of US were hard to see because Google used red roads, and our route was drawn in red. Quick and dirty solution: routes/trips outside of US get a blue line for the route rather than red. US routes/trips still get the red. A better solution is in the works which will allow custom (and multiple) line colours when drawing a route. Also, internationally drawn routes would get US zipcode assigned to them. This has been fixed, and now a route should get a correct ‘city, state/province’ assigned to it. Lastly, pasting a link to a route or trip on your Facebook page is now cleaner. We tell Facebook to use a thumbnail of the route as a preview image. Check it out below:

We have a new redesign coming out in the next couple weeks that looks gorgeous. Cameron has done an amazing job in putting it together, and we are all very excited to see it go live. Additionally, I am spending a large amount of time expanding the route planner to encompass better cue sheet support, custom waypoints, geotagged photos and a few other things. Hoping to get this out the door with the redesign, but it is going to be tight! Stay tuned and we will keep everyone up to date.

More Accurate Elevations AND Static Map Images

2009-06-27T00:00:00-07:00

Over the last two weeks, I have been hard at work doing two things: making elevations more accurate, as well as providing static map images that can be embedded into forums. After some hard work, I am pleased to say that both goals have been accomplished! There were multiple reasons for inaccurate gain/loss figures for both uploaded and mapped rides. A more detailed description of the problem and solution can be found at http://cullenking.com and I will let you read that separately, since it involves a decent amount of math :)

Static map images are now available for any route or trip on the site. There are currently two default sizes: a 100×100 pixel thumbnail, as well as a 480×480 pixel image. They are stored as GIF’s, and can be accessed by navigating to any route/trip view page and copy/pasting the link that is provided to the right of the map. The map tiles are provided by the openstreetmap project, which is basically the wikipedia of the mapping world. We are sketching out plans for custom map image sizes, but will likely reserve that feature for premium accounts.

Here is an example of a nice trip in Lake Oswego:

A more detailed post will follow when I have a spare moment. Just wanted to get the word out for now!

New importer, route planner and route viewer

2009-05-22T00:00:00-07:00

It’s been a little while since we have posted an update, however this doesn’t mean we haven’t been at work! Within the last month we have pushed out some minor UI changes, bug fixes etc, as well as some not-so-minor. The two interesting changes that are now found on the site are an improved route planner and viewer, as well as a MUCH improved route importer.

The new route viewer and planner functions much the same as the old, however, the code behind has been written in a much simpler, cleaner and modular way. This is allowing us to work on several cool new features which should be released here shortly. With this more efficient and well thought out codebase, the route viewer and planner is about to get really cool.

Additionally, you can now import rides from Bikely. So, if you have a large amount of rides on either Map My Ride or Bikely, they can be imported with ease. Furthermore, the importer UI has been improved. You can now select which routes to import, as well as name and classify them inline. It is no longer necessary to edit each route after importing, in order to customize the route.

Keep enjoying the site!

New Layout!

2009-04-11T00:00:00-07:00

A month or so back, a friend and user of the site, Garron Hale, gave me some good ideas on redesigning the user page. The result is how the user page has looked for a while now. After that, he offered to mock up a new layout to see if we liked it. He put together a design that we are happy with, and I set to cut it up and implement it.

This design will give us more flexibility as we continue to develop the site, and we’re excited to release it. You can find him on RWGPS, but be sure to check out Garron’s site here: http://www.croptool.com.

Shoot us some feedback if you have any thoughts!

Heart rate zones

2009-03-27T00:00:00-07:00

We have introduced a couple new metrics recently, speed and heart rate zones. Max and average speed is shown when viewing trips, and you can toggle a speed histogram on the map with a checkbox at the top. I just now finished up the basics of heart rate zones.

Setting up heart rate zones is a really easy process, and once you do it you’ll see your heart rate zone durations in your Activity Log, and when viewing your trips. You can set them up by clicking on “Set up heart rate zones” next to the Heart rate checkbox in your Activity Log.

You can also toggle what information you’re looking at in the Activity Log now, by checking and unchecking the options.

If you have an opinion about the Activity Log, our use of heart rate data, or what more should be done, please leave a comment here or get in touch with us.

Gzipping components, including JSON

2009-03-21T00:00:00-07:00

In the vast majority of situations, you’ll want to do the little bit of extra processing to gzip components before sending them to the client. For anything text-based, the bandwidth saved is huge. We have been gzipping our CSS, Javascript, and HTML, but I noticed recently that we are not gzipping JSON. For just a 30 mile trip like this one I took on Monday, the JSON that gets passed to the client is about 120K. My client showed the JSON content type as application/json, but when I added that to my deflate.conf, it still was not gzipping JSON. After adding in text/json as well, it appears to be working as planned. Now my 120K worth of JSON is only 20K transferred, much better!

We’re using Apache 2 on Debian, and getting gzip enabled is as simple as symlinking /etc/apache2/mods-available/deflate* to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled. After doing that, modify the deflate.conf file to look like this:



<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

	AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css text/plain text/xml application/x-javascript text/json application/json

	BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

	BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0⁶⁷⁸ no-gzip

	BrowserMatch \bMSIE <img src=“no-gzip” alt="" />gzip-only-text/html

</IfModule>

Embed maps on your own site

2009-03-19T00:00:00-07:00

Just cooked up another cool feature as requested by a couple users, embeddable routes and trips! You can now embed any route or trip into your blog, website or other medium which allows an iframe to display. Rule of thumb: if you can embed a youtube video in the site, you can embed one of our maps.

Navigate to any route or trip page, and you will now see a small text box underneath the elevation information, labeled Embed URL. Just highlight the text inside, and copy to your site. You can change the width of the embed by editing the ‘width’ attribute of the iframe tag you just copied. By default it is set at 100%, but feel free to change it around. Things start looking crunched and ugly below about 550px though.

See for yourself:

Hope you are enjoying the updates!

Import From Map My Ride

2009-03-18T00:00:00-07:00

Given that one of the goals for Ride With GPS is to become the most used route and workout planner available, we fully expect to see many people migrating from other services to RWGPS. As a result, we figured it might be convenient for our users to automatically import the routes stored under their Map My Ride (MMR) account, without going through the hassle of exporting each route from MMR then uploading them one by one to our site. With that in mind, I took a little time to cook up this simple importer. The UI will be cleaned up here soon, and we will add support for other sites as they are requested by our users.

In order to use the importer, from your profile page select the “Import From…” link located above the main body of the page. This will bring you to some simple instructions, with a field for your MMR username and password. We do not store this information; it is only used for this one request. Any additional requests will require you to re-input your password.

After clicking “Start!”, the request will be generated and you will be redirected to your profile page. If everything goes well, the routes will be imported to your profile. Upon hitting refresh you should see feed items indicating success. If we run into any issues, a feed item will be generated notifying you of the issue. If any problems persist, we can always be contacted at ridewithgps@gmail.com.

Thanks for using our site!

Bad elevations data? We can help!

2009-03-18T00:00:00-07:00

One of the nice things about the design of Ride With GPS from a technical standpoint, is Zack and I have layed a very solid foundation for the site. As a result, adding additional features has become relatively simple. Today we were notified by a user that his elevation data seemed off on his uploaded route. After a brief look at his TCX file (TCX is Garmin’s proprietary log format), it appeared to be his GPS unit rather than how we handle the data. So, after a few minutes of coding, any route or trip can now have its elevation data reloaded from our (accurate to 1 meter) local elevation dataset! This new feature is simple to use.

First off, you might want to read some informative discussion regarding how bike GPS units record their elevation data, and possible reasons discrepancies between our calculations and your bike computers display might exist.

blog.mtbguru.com

To refetch elevations for any route or trip, all you need to do is access the edit page of the route or trip. From the previewer on your profile page, you can edit a route or trip by clicking the (edit) link next to the relevant entry in the previewer. From the route or trip view page, the Edit Route link is located on the right side of the map, below the route information. You must be logged in to see these links.

On the edit page, you would just check the box at the bottom of the form indicating the elevation data is bad. Hit the update button to submit the form, and your elevation data will be updated. Your profile should show a notification of success when the process is finished (in about a second). If there is any sort of issue, an error notification will show instead. Alert us of any errors and we will be happy to resolve them as always.

Thanks again for the feature requests/bug reports. These are extremely helpful in our ongoing work to make this site the best out there. Keep them coming!

New feature: Remember this

2009-03-15T00:00:00-07:00

Ever ran across something on the site that you wanted to go back to later? Now, when you are viewing users, routes, trips, gear, or photos, look for a link that says “Remember this”. It will save that item to your account, and shoot you right back to what you were looking at so your browsing is not interrupted.

I sometimes run across routes that I want to ride, or a cool bike I want to show one of my buddies later, or a user that is adding a bunch of interesting routes. Now I can just click Remember this, and I end up with a new tab on my profile page that looks like this:

We also added a “Support this site” link that is visible in this screenshot. This site is going to be our livelihood, but we are not quick to compromise our users’ interests. If you support what we’re doing and think this service is worth money, we greatly appreciate any support. If you don’t feel like paying, no big deal, there will always be room for free accounts. If you have any ideas on how we can improve, that is greatly appreciated as well. We value your input and will work to meet your needs.

Beginning of workout features

2009-03-14T00:00:00-07:00

One sought after feature is the ability to track training/workouts and see weekly and monthly summaries, as well as be able to set and track fitness goals.

Tonight I laid the groundwork for these features. Trips now default to a calendar view that show weekly and monthly summaries of distance, elevation gain, and duration. Soon this will be extended to allow recording any workout, such as weight lifting, rock climbing, swimming, etc. At the moment, here is how the calendar view looks:

I will be fleshing the workouts features out in the coming days, and would love to hear what you’d like to see out of it, or what you’d like to do with it. If you have any ideas, comment on this post or shoot me off an email and I will incorporate that into my work.

Works in IE6 and IE7 again

2009-03-13T00:00:00-07:00

The maps were broken in IE6 and IE7 for the last few days, so if you couldn’t see any maps that problem has been fixed.

Major updates pushed, more underway

2009-03-08T00:00:00-08:00

We just pushed out some pretty major updates, with many more underway. We are developing at a furious pace now and you will see this site improve dramatically as the weeks go by. Here is a rundown of some of the important changes that have taken place recently:

Routes and trips have been reorganized. Trips essentially are routes now, and the process of adding, editing, and viewing routes and trips has been redone.
Photos are easier to upload with our new uploading tool, and it is easier and faster to browse through photos.
The front page has been completely redone with more information.
Nearly all content is now accessible to non-logged in users.
We have now completely switched to Flash-based maps. This means your browsing experience is considerably faster now.
The Browse Routes page has more advanced searching, so you can search by route length and elevation gain and loss.
Many pages have been redesigned subtly or in a major way.
Everything now works in IE 6 and IE 7!

Additionally, a lot more work has been done that we are still testing. Here are a few things to look forward to in the next week:

New and improved route and trip viewer. More information, more analytical power.
A powerful notification system that delivers relevant site information to your page.
The ability to mark routes, trips, gear, and users as favorites so you can see them whenever you want from your page.

We are pushing hard to turn this site into the best social route sharing site on the internet. If you like what we are doing, now is the time to get involved! Email us at ridewithgps@gmail.com if you:

Have a vested interest in using the site, and have feature ideas that would make the site more useful to you.
Are interested in discussing a partnership or advertising relationship.
Would like to discuss promotional opportunities.
Have anything you want to talk to us about regarding Ride with GPS.

Finally, thanks for checking out our blog. As we continue development we will be keeping this blog updated regularly. In addition to anything else, we hope to begin posting in more detail about the software and technology behind Ride with GPS, so stay tuned!

Cleaned up some data

2009-02-16T00:00:00-08:00

Zack and I have been spending some time bug fixing, in preparation for a new release. Some of these bugs were in the mapping code, which caused a few routes to have bad elevations. Zack cooked up a cool task that went through and found all faulty elevation points, updating with the correct elevations. This fixed 26 routes! There are many more bugs we have been squishing, and we will provide a more detailed announcement when we are nearing an actual “release”.

Quick update

2008-10-22T00:00:00-07:00

We have been silently updating features on the site over the past few months, making it faster, and setting it up to support some really cool features we are working on, but also breaking some things in the process. We just fixed a couple of these:

Uploading photos for gear works again

Uploading GPS data works again

As usual, if you see any bugs, please use the Ideas? form in the top right. Thanks!

More features!

2008-01-28T00:00:00-08:00

Some additions to our work done yesterday, which will greatly improve gear and trip searchability. You can now decide what type of gear you are entering. You have two choices: methods of transportation, and accessories. Transportation types allow us to define what your planned route is good for, as well as to say what you took on a trip. Now you can search routes for ones that are compatible with your preferred activity. You can also input accessories such as GPS units, safety gear, running/hiking shoes etc, that can be taken on a trip in addition to your method of transportation.

We introduced a temporary bug: In our work towards efficiency yesterday, we accidentally broke your ability to add photos. We are working on fixing this issue, and will have it back shortly!

Snow in Eugene and RWGPS updates

2008-01-27T00:00:00-08:00

Looks like we finally received some cool weather here in Eugene, which made for a nice day of coding. Here are some of the updates:

You can specify what routes are for (riding a motorcycle, mountain biking, hiking, running, cycling, etc). Edit your routes and check off what they are for! This will help people find them.
No more horizontal scrollbar for most users that were experiencing this.
Improved efficiency (which translates to faster browsing) throughout the site.
Added a search by zip code with distance threshold on browse routes page.

More publicity!

2008-01-25T00:00:00-08:00

KOIN channel 6 news picked up the story from KVAL and ran the story at 6 and 11pm last night. Thanks Lisa!

8:00 PM: Fixed quotations in live conversations, now those messages don’t get lost. Many minor aesthetic improvements throughout the site. Added paged results for your inbox, as well as when viewing conversation messages. Fixed incorrect reporting of number of friends for a user.

KVAL CBS 13 Eugene releases story

2008-01-23T00:00:00-08:00

KVAL covered us this morning with a segment that aired live at 6AM this morning. View the link below for story and video.

KVAL – Full Article with Video
KATU Portland also is hosting the story

Development continues!

2008-01-23T00:00:00-08:00

7:07 PM: Added link back to a photo’s parent (gear, profile, group etc) when viewing a photo
6:30 PM: Added the Browse Routes page!
5:37 PM: Drawing routes is cleaner and less bug-prone now. Drawing very large (>300 miles) routes is still buggy, and it is being worked on.
3:55 PM: Was there a problem fetching elevation data for your route? Edit the route, and you’ll see a checkbox to re-fetch the elevation data and fix this.
2:30 PM: User searching is in place now, just click browse users and start typing in the name of who you’re looking for.
Various minor bugs have been quashed

Oregon Daily Emerald releases article and video

2008-01-15T00:00:00-08:00

A big thank you to the Oregon Daily Emerald for their excellent article on our project. We enthusiastically encourage any new users that were tipped off about us through the paper to give the Emerald your positive feedback on their story. The full text of the article can be found at the following link:

The Daily Emerald – Video

The Daily Emerald – Full Article