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

1. To enable “auto-routing”, check the “Auto-Route” checkbox above the map. You can check and uncheck this option at any point while you’re creating the route.
2. Routing is based on Driving directions
• The API will take you from Point A to Point N along the shortest route. It’s possible that the directions will take you on freeways and on other less desirable routes.
• When routing, choose waypoints that you know won’t take you on freeways.
• The Auto-Routing feature will not work on bike trails. For these segments of your route, you’ll have to rely on the “old” way of creating your route. Once you’ve jumped back on the road, you can enable routing again.
• Be cognizant of one-way roads: auto-routing will obey the road rules.
3. Consider the SIDE of the road that you click on
• If you click on the “wrong” side of the road while you’re in auto-route mode, the route will likely take you to the next intersection past that point, then make you “U-turn” to get on that side of the street.
• Auto-Route works best if you’re at low zoom levels.
4. Mistakes happen
• If you mistakenly click the opposite side of the road, or the route takes a “wrong” turn, you can “undo” the auto-route operation.

Regardless, despite it being Finals Week, I managed to peel myself away and work on implementing auto-routing on RouteSlip.com.

I think Auto-Routing will improve RouteSlip.com users’ experience immeasurably! Not only can you click on “Point A” and then “Point Z” and have it trace your route for you, it also pulls in the turn-by-turn directions that are LACKING in so many users’ routes.
I’ll follow this post up with helpful hints about using the auto-routing feature.

How to Use Auto-Routing

By default, Auto-routing is off. In order to enable it, just check the “Auto-route” checkbox at the top of the map. To switch it off (even in the middle of a route) just uncheck the checkbox.

have fun!

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.

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.

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!

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!

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!

Thanks for your patience!

- Ryan