RouteSlip.com Updates

Right to the Point

I’m excited to announce that RouteSlip.com has been acquired by MapMyFitness. 

MapMyFitness is a collection of excellent fitness websites including MapMyRide, the leading website for creating and sharing cycling routes and tracking your training goals.

What Does this Mean?

The acquisition means great things to come for RouteSlip.com users.

Lots of new features and great user support.

The founders of MapMyFitness share my excitement for riding and my commitment to the cycling community. MapMyFitness has a staff of full-time developers and sales reps, and the management team is doing a great job building the infrastructure for a sustainable business.  Moreover, I will become a member of the MapMyFitness technical steering committee, helping generate ideas and implement new features. I’ve received a lot of flattering emails from people about RouteSlip.com, and I’m looking forward to working with the MapMyFitness team to develop unique features for users. 
 
Your user account and all of your routes will be saved.

We will automatically merge RouteSlip.com user accounts and routes to the MapMyRide platform, and traffic to RouteSlip.com will be re-directed to MapMyRide.  I will keep you posted on the process, and I will let you know in advance if RouteSlip.com is going to be offline.  RouteSlip.com will continue to operate as normal until the merger is complete.  In the next several weeks, we will begin the migration of data from RouteSlip.com to MapMyFitness. Our goal is to complete the migration by the end of the year.

What’s Next?

First, I want to thank each of you for making RouteSlip.com successful. I’m really happy that I was able to create something that so many people have enjoyed. Second, let me know which features you like the most about RouteSlip.com, and what you’d like to see at MapMyRide. Please don’t hesitate to email me with any comments or questions. We’ve set up public forum in the MapMyFitness public forums to help answer any questions you may have. Finally, I hope you’re as excited as I am about the next steps.  I look forward to creating and sharing routes with you at MapMyRide.

Thanks,

Ryan Huff
Founder, RouteSlip.com

Hi all. I wanted to let everyone know that I’m making every attempt to increase my involvement in the development and maintenance of RouteSlip.com. Along with that are some plans I have for making this more financially viable and worthwhile.

That being said, none of the events in my life have changed to a considerable degree, so new features, support, etc. will still be slow — but it’s better than total cold turkey.

A couple comments about support:

First: I’ll do my best to fix site-wide issues that affect all users, and those that affect all users of a certain browser class (i.e. IE6 or IE 7 or FireFox 2.0, etc). I won’t be able to address issues that individual users are having, like:

• Routes won’t display for me
• I can’t create a route
• I can’t log in
• …

The site does work. However, it’s always possible (and likely in some cases) that I’ll introduce a bug that breaks something else in the application. As soon as I become aware of the bug, I’ll begin to look into the issue. A good example are the recent issues where users saw database error messages on the “My Routes” page (I’m still looking into that one).

Second: The RouteSlip.com community has grown huge by all expectations I had and the Community Discussion Forum can be a huge benefit to users that are having “one off” problems with the site. I’ll open it up completely so that all users can post to it and request help from the rest of the community.
Lastly, I’m working on an advertising program to help support my efforts on the site. Part of that will include a referral program that pays contributors for advertisers that they bring in to the site. More information will be coming soon, but for those of you that have asked about ways to help support the site, this is it.

Hello, all. I’ve been going back and forth on whether or not to write this entry for a while. I figure now’s the time…

As much as I would love to, I don’t have the time right now to put into maintaining RouteSlip.com. A couple reasons:

• One man team
• Full-time job (at a startup)
• Newborn baby
• Part time MBA program

… I think that pretty much covers it. I’ve received a few offers of help, but for numerous reasons, I haven’t found someone that can (or wants to) take over support right now.

And while I appreciate a few people’s offers of donations to help keep me involved, but the constraint is time - not money.

I have pages and pages of new features I would love to add, and I would really like to be able to solve each person’s problems with the site. Regarding the latter, it’s just more than I can handle - even if I were full time on this.

And lastly, just to get this off my chest… I’d like to remind people that RouteSlip is a free service. I’ve received several emails commenting about the current lack of support that I can only describe as rude. For a long time I was very diligent in responding to each and every bug report, but for the reasons listed above, it’s just not something I can do anymore - or at least, right now.

Feel free to comment.

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Update:

Thank you to everyone for their encouragement and support. Just to clarify — I certainly will NOT be pulling the plug, and I am not planning on ditching the development effort altogether. Just at this time, it’s not possible for me to continue development. A friend of mine is moving to a pretty small town in Tennessee and mentioned that he was able to find some great routes in the same area. I definitely don’t want to take a resource like this away from anyone.
I would be more than happy to moderate a semi-open source effort to maintain the site through distributed means — I just need to find someone(s) that wants to put the time and commitment into it. Thanks again!

Apparently, some a$$hole thought it’d be cute to hack the site yesterday and start spamming people through my domain. My ISP disabled the script that was attacked, and I’m working on fixing it. More later…

It looks like Elevation data’s been out of commission for the last day or two. Unfortunately, the feed’s dead at the moment. I’ll reload when it comes back up.

I need help from the community out there in supporting and developing future enhancements to the RouteSlip.com site. My requirements are pretty specific: I need programmers who are experts in JavaScript (5 out of 5) and very capable with PHP (4 out of 5).

As much as it pains me to say it, RouteSlip’s gone beyond what I can support right now, and I feel I owe it to the community that has been so supportive and encouraging during the initial development of the site to not abandon it.

I’m only one person, and am stretched way too thin right now without even considering RouteSlip development.

If you’re interested, post a comment to this post and I’ll get in touch with you.

Thanks!

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Update: I appreciate the offers, but RouteSlip.com cannot and will not be a paid service.

Well I finally completed the site upgrade to the new host and the new code base. You’ll see some minor functional enhancements, namely the improved interface for the Discover pages, but primarily, the changes were made to support continued growth of the site.

Also, it was one year ago this week that RouteSlip.com was first released! I started collecting traffic reports in earnest last April, and since then, we’ve received almost 750,000 hits to the site!

Development’s slowed on the site for now because of several recent changes in my life (birth of our daughter, new job, going back to school…) I may be able to find help in developing the site, so hopefully we’ll see some new changes to the site soon.

Thanks for all the support, and have a great 2007!

The site is finally moved off the old host! You should notice that the database errors that plagued the site are now gone. That’s the first step. The next step is to push out an upgrade that I’ve been working on for quite a while that will really make RouteSlip.com more “mature” — the upgrade will have few visual changes immediately, but you should notice much quicker response times on the site, and RouteSlip.com will now be able to scale with increased usage!

Thanks for your patience!

- Ryan

There have been some pretty major changes in my personal life of late and I haven’t been able to put the amount of time into RouteSlip.com as I was able to in the last several months. I’m not shutting down development, but for now, I’ll probably be focussing what time I have on fixing bugs that come up and issues with scalability of the site.

If you’re a good PHP developer and a GREAT Javascript developer, drop me a line — maybe we can collaborate.

Thanks!!!!!!!

As mentioned in an earlier post, RouteSlip.com is growing faster than the $8/month current hosting provider’s services can handle. Last month, I had nearly 120,000 pageviews on the site. Today, the database errors out when traffic exceeds a certain limit, and I have no control over the software that runs the site or the configuration of the system.

So the solution is to move hosting providers. In order to scale for the future — because I have much more planned for the site — hosting and overhead costs are going to increase over 4,000%.

In order to defray these costs, I’m in the process of looking for site sponsors. If you have contacts in the cycling industry and think their company would be interested in having exclusive advertising rights on the site (for the duration of the contract), please have them drop me a line at info@routeslip.com. I can provide detailed statistics on the usage of the site.
Update/Additional Thoughts

On Donations: Some people in the last couple days have asked how they can send me a donation to help support the site. My feeling is that I can’t support the costs of upgraded hosting on “hoping” that I get enough voluntary donations. Also, I feel that if you’re in a generous mood, there are better causes to support than RouteSlip.com. The charity that I’m involved with is the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and if you would like to make a donation to support LLS, you can do so from my donation page. A donation to LLS in my name means a lot more to me than one to help defray the costs of hosting.
On Sponsorship: It only ocurred to me later that “corporate sponsorship” has a kind of negative connotation to it. I wanted to make clear (if anyone was worried, which I doubt) a few things:

1. Corporate sponsors will not have access to personal information of RouteSlip.com users. Sponsors will receive regular reports on the traffic to the site, likely broken down by user demographics and geography.
2. No pop-up windows, annoying ads (well… annoying to me… It’s all relative I guess), etc. Here’s an example of a page that I think has done it right (note “Sponsored by Land Rover”).

On Hosting: I’ve found a hosting provider that I can grow with. It requires a bit of recoding on my part due to a different back-end, but I think that’s part of the problem, so it’s good to get started. Thanks for the offers and suggestions on hosts.