RouteSlip.com Updates

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.

A frequent feature request is to have the route automatically follow the road so that you don’t have to click through hundreds of points. I absolutely agree, BUT… (there’s always a “but”)

Unfortunately, the software that enables this isn’t freely available in a format that I can translate into use for routes.

I can already hear people saying, “But site XYZ.com does it!!!”

From what I can tell, the non-commercial sites that I’ve seen do this (i.e. not Google and Yahoo!) are using a method that isn’t technically permitted by Google’s Terms of Use for the Google Maps APIs. (See a recent conversation I started on the topic).

If someone can convince me otherwise, I’ll be happy to add it in!

I imagine that open routing utilities will become available sometime soon, but until then, I hope you’re content with clicking and GPX.

Many people have been telling me that they wanted to import GPS data to create routes — NOW YOU CAN!

A major “thank you” to Martyn Davis, creator of the Marengo GPS Route Planner who inspired the idea of playing with the GPX on the client side — a big reason this feature took so long to implement it was that I was limited with what I could do on the server side. He has a lot of information about GPS devices that I have no idea about, so go check it out.

I know there are going to be a bunch of “Great… Now I want to [insert feature here]” comments, so I’m going to head off a few that I think are going to come most often:

1. Exporting routes to GPX for uploading to your GPS device. It’s coming.
2. Inserting points mid-route: It’s coming

Enjoy!

The “Route type” option when uploading a GPS data file controls the detail that the plotted route will contain. Most GPS devices plot more points than are necessary on RouteSlip.com, so only points that are a certain distance threshold from one another will be plotted. Choosing the “Mountain/Trail” option will plot more points on the route, which is great for curvy, climbing rides. The “City/Urban” option is best for routes with fewer turns.

I just added the ability to log entries for routes that are in your Favorites and Paceline.

I will also open the journal up to allow entry of rides that aren’t in RouteSlip.com yet (but I’m sure you can’t wait to add them).

Also, GPX import is in the works. For those not in the know — like me before I was initiated — GPX is the file format that you get from your GPS-enabled device (like the Garmin Edge) when you download it to your computer.

See the question/poll I posed to the discussion board…

I try my best to test the site before I release any new code, but sometimes I miss something. Typically, the problem relates to the Javascript that runs the page. Usually, I can reproduce the problem and correct it — but sometimes I can’t, and I may ask if you see any Javascript errors. Here’s how you can tell:

1. Click the “Tools”, then “Javascript Console” (a.k.a. “Error Console”)
2. You will see something like this:



3. The FireFox JS Console has a pretty good memory — it stores every error that it’s encountered since it was opened. However, I don’t really care about most of it, so clear what’s in there first by clicking the “Clear” button.
4. Now, reload the page where you got the error, and do whatever it was that you were doing when it happened.
5. Pull up the JS console now and let me know what it says.

• Note: If you spent a lot of time working on something before you got the error and don’t want to waste more of your time, don’t clear the console - and just scroll down to the bottom and report anything you see in the bottom few lines.

I try my best to test the site before I release any new code, but sometimes I miss something. Typically, the problem relates to the Javascript that runs the page. Usually, I can reproduce the problem and correct it — but sometimes I can’t, and I may ask if you see any Javascript errors. Here’s how you can tell:

In the lower-left hand corner of the browser, you may see this icon:

If you double-click that icon, you can get more information about the problem. This is what I’m really after. Here’s what it looks like:

Occasionally, users will experience problems when they view a dynamic site with Internet Explorer. Often times, it isn’t a problem on the web site that causes the problem, but a bug in IE that doesn’t handle caching well.

The browser’s “cache” is a folder where copies of the (public) web pages and images that you view are stored so that the browser can quickly grab the file when you need it later. The web browser cache is set to a specific limit — say 100 MB. Typically, when the cache reaches that limit and you visit a new web page, the oldest content in the cache is deleted to make room for the new content.

In IE, there seems to be a problem with doing this, and instead IE will complain about other problems. Many times, the solution is very simple: clear the cache. Here’s how:

1. From Internet Explorer, click “Tools” and then “Internet Options”



2. Click the “Delete Files” button, and check the “offline content” option, then click “OK”.



3. When it’s done, click “OK” out of the Internet Options, restart the browser, and then return to the site.

It’s not guaranteed, but in my experience, it often helps. Generally, the longer it takes to delete the files, the better your chances that it will fix the problem.

:)

Sometimes users notice that the elevation profile on their route page either shows a broken profile line, or suddenly drops to sea level (0 ft).

The elevation data comes from the USGS elevation query service. The service is queried for each point, as you plot it. Sometimes the service “hiccups” and doesn’t return data — or returns “0″ inadvertently. Other times, the service is completely down and either does not return any data, or returns “0″ for everything.

In order to fix this problem, I routinely scan the data files and reload the missing data. If you notice that your profile looks odd, just let me know and I’ll take a look and reload the data.