MTBGuru blog

We made it back from Lake San Antonio, having enjoyed the ‘Woodstock of Triathlons‘ weekend.

Here’s the details on the bike leg of the long course, which I rode as part of a relay team, helping out a co-worker in need.

There’s nothing like the feeling of a three hour time trial with seemingly persistent headwinds and a couple of nasty grades towards the end kicking your ass! My respect for triathletes has even increased: the headwinds in combination with the no drafting rule (we’re time trialing after all!) made the first, supposedly easy, 20 miles a sufferfest; the following, rolling and mostly descending 20 miles were a welcome break but the sting was definitely in the end, with a succession of hills that are made to hurt. And then biking is only one third of the story…

Kudos to everyone who was racing - there were a (shorter) mountain bike course on Saturday, and an olympic distance course on Sunday as well. To any other GPS geeks who were out there: it would be great if the other legs and races would get uploaded!

The camping, expo and related festivities were a lot of fun, and made for a memorable weekend.

Technorati Tags: Wildflower triathlon

The Wildflower is for triathlon what the Sea Otter Classic is for cycling: one of the largest events of their kind in the US (and world) and to some extent the non-official opening of the (summer) season.

We’re heading off down south - the event takes place in the scenic and sparsely populated area around Lake San Antonio in Central California - and you can expect to see (at least) the cycling leg published on MTBGuru soon!

Last year’s transition zone, after the race

Technorati Tags: Wildflower triathlon

Up until now, when you created a trip on MTBGuru, there were two different default privacy settings in use:

• When you had created the trip using ‘Add a Trip‘ in the sidepanel, the trip was by default ‘Public’, with comments disabled.




• When you had created the trip using ‘Upload GPS Data‘, or out of one of your GPS files in ‘My GPS Files’, the trip was by default ‘Private’.

The thinking behind this was that when uploading straight GPS files, the user’s privacy would be better served by keeping the default setting of the resulting trip and the data private; this as opposed to ‘Add a trip’ where by default the user would ‘publish’ or add the trip to the public MTBGuru trip base.

On the other hand this was all quite confusing, so we just implemented a new and better way of tackling this:

• When you now create a trip using ‘Upload GPS Data’, instead of the ‘Create Trip’ button after the upload you will be presented with two ‘Create Trip’ choices: [Public] or [Private] (see screenshot below). As you need to select one of either to create the trip, there is no need anymore for a ‘default setting’.







• Creating a trip using ‘Add a Trip’ remains unchanged and still results in a default ‘Public’ setting; comments are enabled by default now as well (screenshot below).

Of course, afterwards you can still change trip settings on the fly, as before.

And if you want to switch a whole set of your trips at once from Private to Public or vice versa, you can make use of the ‘Choose Action’ feature and the checkboxes on ‘My Trips’, as was previously possible as well (screenshot below).

Lots of buzz today about the release of a new feature on Google Maps, called My Maps, allowing users to annotate and save maps with their own content: placemarks that may contain links, photos or text (any html really), lines, routes and shapes. GigaOM even talks about the ’smashing of maps mashups’ and the impending doom it may bring to existing third party web apps, as Google’s own offering now seems to take away the wind out of the sails of many of these mashups and mapping startups.

We don’t worry about this but are actually rather excited about it: Google uses the KML format to save the data and feed it back into the Web. This makes for a nice and closer alignment between Google Maps and Google Earth (potentially leading one to become even more philosophical about the future of the Web and the advent of geobrowsers) - for us it means in particular that all KML files generated on MTBGuru are now also available on Google Maps.

As an example, let’s assume we’re interested in bike rides at Skeggs point near Woodside (one of our own local favorites). When we go to Google Maps and type in ‘Skeggs, Woodside CA’ in the main search box, we get the following result (screenshot below, click the image for a larger version):

The content in the left sidebar consists of Google’s featured links (typically these are local businesses that paid to be listed here). Below these, you can see a link titled ‘See user-created content’ (encircled in red). Clicking on this will now lead to a web search for KML files, relevant to this location and search, with the following result (see screenshot):

As MTBGuru creates and publishes KML files on the Web for each public trip and geotagged picture, you may find MTBGuru links appear in the sidebar, with corresponding placemarks on the map, as is the case here.

Click now for instance on the first placemark (’Skeggs Point - Manzanita Overview’) - this points to an ‘overview’ KML file that contains the route, see the next screenshot below:

You can now save these routes and placemarks in Google’s My Maps - click on the placemarks and you’ll see a link appear titled ‘Save to My Maps’ (two examples below):

This basically enables anyone to save and catalog public data on MTBGuru in My Maps, and annotate it with their own content (overlayed routes, additional commentary or pictures), and we’re all in favor of that!

It would become even nicer if Google could give the ‘User-created content’ link a more prominent position in the sidebar upon a search, so it would be easier for people to browse the rich KML content out there on the Web.

When winter attacks, we head to the hills - to ski or ride them!
Skiing and snowboarding seem like a natural fit for mountain bikers and cyclists. Muscle groups are kept in shape and similar adrenaline rushes are generated - and you can throw in backcountry and cross country skiing or snowshoeing to obtain the equivalent of endorphin inducing climbs.

You may have noticed the new trip icon on MTBGuru. Tracking your ski or snowboard days with a GPS can have entertaining results: you can count your runs and calculate how much a run costed you (hint: more than a beer), keep track of your vertical, check your top speed etcetera.

And I’ve been told some backcountry skiers seem to really love Google Earth to scout new runs or areas they plan to ski.

An example of what you can do with the MTBGuru/Google Earth combo: a ski trip in Sierra-at-Tahoe uploaded to MTBGuru and a Google Earth screenshot of it using the resulting KML file.

As a web application, MTBGuru.com obviously lives and works in your web browser, be it FireFox, Internet Explorer, Safari or any other browser of your choice.

Meanwhile, Google Earth is increasingly evolving into a ‘geobrowser‘ of its own. While web browsers offer a window on a world of interlinked HTML files, Google Earth does a similar thing with KML files. More and more content is added in the form of KML files and can be accessed through ‘layers’. And recently, a new search capability has been added.

When you type something in the Search box of Google Earth, besides the usual ‘Local business results’ (orange placemarks) you will now also see ‘Web Results’ (green placemarks, see screenshot); based on your current view in Google Earth these ‘Web results’ are populated by placemarks in KML files found on the Internet as search results.

Also KLM files originating from public MTBGuru trips are indexed, as you can see in the example below: when you type in ‘Skeggs Point’ while looking at the San Francisco Peninsula, the picture placemarks of a Skeggs trip appear. If you zoom you’ll see the (red) track as well. In the sidebar you’lll notice the placemarks listed next to green placemark icons as Web Results, below the local business results.
So now you can effectively also search and browse for MTBGuru trips in Google Earth!

A quick note to let you know that we fixed the map rendering problem in Safari - everything is working smoothly now, so also Safari users can now enjoy the site in its full glory using their favorite browser!

Did you know you can add video and audio clips to your trip page?

Check out for instance this trip, a hike to the summit of Mount Tyndall in California’s Sierra Nevada, where a Google Earth flyover movie was added to the trip description field (screenshot below).

MTBGuru isn’t hosting the video files but you can use material you’ve stored or found on YouTube or any other video sharing site that allows you to embed movies on external sites. Just copy the snippet of code these sites point you to and paste it in the trip description box. Here’s what such code looks like (in ‘Edit Description’ mode):

The same works for audio. If you want to add a tune to your trip page, share some footage or perhaps an entire podcast in which you describe your adventures, you can use web apps such as Podomatic to create the podcast or upload mp3 audio files, and then embed them on your trip page. As an exampe, check out this trip of mine, with some FunkyLondon sounds for increased enjyoment…
Of course, make sure you respect the terms of use of these sites and any applicable copyrights.

We just deployed a brand new site search tool - you can find it in the sidebar where it is replacing the older Google site search form.

This search tool searches our database directly and will give you a complete and accurate set of results. The search results are summarized and marked up in a much more useful and appealing way - as demonstrated in the screenshot below.

You can use it like you’d use any search engine but in addition there is a rich query language and syntax that is supported - our search tool is based on Ferret, a full text search utility in Ruby.

Some examples: you can use Boolean operators, such as AND, OR, NOT to compose your queries: ‘Demo AND NOT forest’ will for instance return results where the word ‘Demo’ is present but not followed by ‘forest’. Another example is the use of wildcards: a search for ‘Demo*’ will give you hits containing the word ‘Demo’ but also hits with words as ‘Demonstration’ or ‘Demographic’. And so on - check out this overview of the syntax.

Enjoy the search for new trips and rides!

It’s really cool to see people posting trips from all corners of the world: for instance Australia, Croatia, Taiwan, besides numerous states in the US.

When someone arrives on the site, be it a registered user or not, we use services like HostIP and GeoIP to try to figure out where she or he is coming from, in order to center the home page’s map this visitor will see on this location. These services essentially consist of databases relating IP addresses to geographic locations.

Instead of some default location the main map will initially zoom in and center on an area which is most likely the area of interest to this person. Unfortunately, the databases are not 100% accurate; also, there are cases where you’ll be using a different IP address that may alter this location - for instance when you’re using public WiFi or when you’re traveling.

To overcome these issues, we’ve now implemented a feature that allows you to control and set your home map’s initial location. Look for the two buttons on the right top corner of the map, just below the ‘Hybrid’ button (screenshot below):

• Set Home: click on this button to set your home location to the current view of the map.
• To Home: click on this button and the map will move back from wherever you’re at to the home location you’ve set.

So in case you’re not happy with the map you see when you log in or land on the site, you can now navigate (zoom/pan) to an area that you’d like to have as your home map and use the ‘Set Home’ button to save this view. This setting overrules the GeoIP detection.

We use cookies to do this, so you’ll need to have these enabled in your browser - the only thing they’ll do is store a map coordinate on your computer so your browser knows where to point your home map. And of course, we’re not sharing any of this information with anyone, we are strongly committed to ensure the privacy of our users, as we state in our privacy policy.