I did however jump on the website Sunday morning to track a few friends and neighbors making the 26.2 mile run on Sunday and was pleasantly surprised at the live race tracking features. The TC Marathon site was using live race tracking from Mtrack.  I have tracked plenty of marathon runners online and just received the standard times and split updates, but Mtrack has integrated Google maps to this providing both location and time tracking.  Based on the timing of the runner at specific distance points, they also can estimate the progress of the runner.  Here is a screen shot below from Sunday.

This mapping and estimated progress feature even allowed me to help my neighbors family find her on the race course as I called them to give them time splits and location.  What a cool feature.

The tracking tool also has some marketing built into as well.  In the lower right corner there is the ability to show the Caribou Coffee locations along the race spectator course.  I’m sure the race promoters could do this with any sponsor they’d like.  Here is the race course map with that feature enabled:

Very cool and it looks like form the Mtrack website that this service might be a Minnesota company since the only 2 races they offer this on is Grandmas (Duluth) and the Twin Cities Marathon.  Maybe next year the website will get a face lift.

We’re all about giving due credit and promoting those that design these great websites but we want to give all of you MN web design peeps some motivation (aka the carrot) to contribute to Websota.  Give a little effort, get a little link.

Example: Jason of Catalyst Studios submitted this site to Websota this week and as you can see on the details page, he earned himself a link to the Catalyst website.

We hope that answers the question on how to get credit and a link for the work / design featured here.  So now you can go ahead and get that carrot!

Have any other great t-shirt slogan ideas for us? We’d love to hear them.

What is Websota?
Built as a side project by Five Technology, the site is a spin-off from all of the great CSS gallery websites on the web.  We’ve loved being featured on them and thought there should be a place for great Minnesota web design to reside and be viewed.  Take the time to view the featured work, rate it and consider nominating a site you like or built.

You’ll notice we’d like to build a great list of Minnesota web design firms and freelancers as well.  If you are looking for the right company or person for your next web project, giver ‘er a peek.  If you are a MN web designer, tell us about yourself or your company.

Got blogs? Yes we do.  We’re building a list of Minnesota blogs.

Of course we are looking forward to tweaking things and adding more, but we’ll just have to wait and see what that might be.  Ultimately, would like to become a valuable and worthy spot for anything Minnesota web design related.  It will only happen with your help.

So give us a shot.  Follow us on Twitter (@websota), or email us your thoughts or feedback (ubetcha@websota.com).  We’re happy to listen.