Ride with GPS

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!

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!

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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!

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.

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\.0[678] no-gzip
	BrowserMatch \bMSIE <img src="no-gzip" alt="" />gzip-only-text/html
</IfModule>

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!

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!