Map My Ride (and other similar sites)

[Ray]

I've referred to (and seen a few other references to) the Map My Ride website recently. I was pointed to this site not too long ago. And I gotta say, this concept (whether on that site or other competitors who are popping up) simply rocks.

Whenever I've been in a strange place with my bike, my rides tend to be pretty tame, sticking to too many main roads and not taking too many chances on what I'm gonna find off the beaten path. Or I'm with an organized tour, in which case I'm paying someone for their intimate knowledge of the local roads. I generally don't like lots of things about bike tours, but generally find them worthwhile just because of some of the beautiful roads you get to ride that you'd never discover on your own (assuming a limited amount of time in the area). But I've always been reticent about just taking my bike along on vacations because I figured I wouldn't want to ride on the roads that were easy to figure out.

But with the advent of sites like this, greatly enabled by GPS based bike computers, its really easy to get way off the beaten path and benefit from the knowledge of lots of locals who know the area really well. On your own time.

In the past, when I had a particularly great loop in my area, I'd painstakingly go through and try to either map it or generate a cue-sheet for it and send it out to friends to ride. But it was quite a PIA and I only did it a few times before deciding it wasn't worth the effort. But with a Garmin GPS based computer, now I can simply record a ride and post it on Map My Ride and ANYONE can download it and print out a map. Or if they have a Garmin 605 or 705 they can download it directly into the computer and be guided through it on the road.

For sure, some folks might post some really sorry rides and there's no guarantee that what someone else likes in a ride is gonna be what you like in a ride. But there are a LOT of rides up in my local area and I've looked a a bunch of them and almost all of them are great loops. Most of which I've done all or parts of, but some that I haven't (and now plan to check out).

I'm now looking forward to taking my bike along on some family trip figuring I can get a few good rides in over the course of a week or two away. These sites just seem like an almost perfect use of new technology to both make creating and sharing information easier.

Anyone else been using these sites much?

-Ray

[William]

I really like this service....

http://forums.thepaceline.net/showthread.php?t=57285&highlight=Map+ride


Easy to use and the guys are very helpful with feed back and suggestions to make it more user friendly.




William

[Ray]

I really like this service....

http://forums.thepaceline.net/showthread.php?t=57285&highlight=Map+ride


Easy to use and the guys are very helpful with feed back and suggestions to make it more user friendly.




William
Yeah, I think I'd seen that site too (probably from your thread) but forgot the name. I checked it out and it looked good, but it doesn't have near the inventory of rides that Map My Ride has so far. Hopefully, that's just a matter of time. Competition's gotta be good so the more the better. I just love the CONCEPT of using both GPS technology and the internet to give people the benefit of intimate knowledge of an area's roads. Its a real world quality of life improvements, which are talked about far more often than realized.

EDIT - just went and checked and that site only has three rides in the whole Philly area and none out in the West Chester area, whereas Map My Ride has several pages of rides starting in my little town alone. So its just a matter of time for various sites to pop up and compete and may the best ones win. The elevation maps on RidewithGPS look a lot better than on map my ride. I'm not sure how MMR does it, but they show max grades of about 3% on rides around here where there are quarter mile to half mile stretches at over 10% - they must be averaging over larger increments or something, but it makes the elevation profiles damn near useless.

-Ray

[paczki]

I use Bikely. Love it.

[jchasse]

BUT...Ride With GPS has a feature that allows you to import rides from MapMyRide and Bikely.

I've been using Ride With GPS myself recently, and like it. And each time i've had a question or comment, the two guys that built the site have responded within a day. The site's still fairly new, but they keep adding functionality...

[William]

BUT...Ride With GPS has a feature that allows you to import rides from MapMyRide.

I've been using Ride With GPS myself recently, and like it. And each time i've had a question or comment, the two guys that built the site have responded within a day. The site's still fairly new, but they keep adding functionality...


Yes, it just takes folks to add their favorite routes in and it will grow. Jchasse beat me to it about the import feature. Ride with GPS has great tools and the customer service is fast and always helpful. Seems to be more accurate then the few others I've tried.




William

[wasfast]

I think it varies depending on your main purpose. I use ridewithgps for entering rides with the "follow roads" feature which is excellent. Gives me the vertical feet and distance. I don't have a gps unit, just regular bike computer. It's a nice site and I hope the guys are able to get something financially out of it eventually.

[jchasse]

William, have you noticed that the average and max speeds on RideWithGPS are consistently lower than the numbers on your GPS? In fact the averages are always lower than the numbers you get by calculating the average based on their reported ride time and distance. I definately don't get too hung up on average speeds (if i did i'd need a prescription for Prozac), but it's odd.

Zack was going to look into it today ;)

[palincss]

I've referred to (and seen a few other references to) the Map My Ride website recently. I was pointed to this site not too long ago. And I gotta say, this concept (whether on that site or other competitors who are popping up) simply rocks.


Mapmy ride rocks? It used to. Not any more. Sucks? Definitely. If you're not a paid member, they stick intrusive ads right under your mouse pointer that simply cannot be moved away to stay away. What's more, they've cleverly made the cue sheet in the latest version of the interface impossible to copy and paste. You get points for putting in rides; I have thousands of points. Are they worth anything? Of course not.

I have dozens of rides in mapmyride, but I am through with them. Done. I've moved to Bikely.com.

Bikely is not without its imperfections. You have to type in the cues, it won't capture them automatically from the google map interface, which mapmyride used to do. It's sometimes a bit quirky about saving, and it's search function is poor.

There are some things it does outstandingly well. The "tour the route cue by cue" feature is pretty nifty. And it doesn't harass you with annoyances to try to extort money from you, the way mapmyride does.

There's another set of problems all these sites have. Collectively, they're all google map mashups. For licensing reasons, they can't use NavTeq map data, but have to use TeleAtlas. I find that while TeleAtlas seems to have more current/accurate road names than NavTeq, it seems to have more imaginary roads. Sometimes, if there's good satellite coverage in an area, you can switch to the satellite view and zoom it up to max and confirm for yourself whether the road actually exists, and whether two roads that on the map connect actually do so. But that doesn't always work: there are places where the coverage is very lo-rez.

Also the google map interface is not entirely without its problems: if you retrace you can end up capturing the mileage from the first time you passed a point, not the mileage when you returned. Every mapping site I've tried had this problem.

That said, the concept, even with all the issues, is fantastic and revolutionary. It's as big a game changer for us as the LED blinkie or indexed shifting.

[Tom]

Google Earth is also really good to eyeball, in a general way, an unfamiliar route.

[William]

William, have you noticed that the average and max speeds on RideWithGPS are consistently lower than the numbers on your GPS? In fact the averages are always lower than the numbers you get by calculating the average based on their reported ride time and distance. I definately don't get too hung up on average speeds (if i did i'd need a prescription for Prozac), but it's odd.

Zack was going to look into it today ;)


No I had not. Though, admittedly I don't worry much about that any more. :)



William

[mpetry]

I'm cycling Seattle - SFO leaving sunday and have built a complete triptick of the route with cues and notes - it's great to survey the route from 1000 feet and discover interesting side trips. There's a cable ferry in southern Oregon, for example, that's right on our way.

What a great resource.

Mark Petry
Bainbridge Island, WA

[Ray]

Mapmy ride rocks? It used to. Not any more. Sucks? Definitely.

<snip>

That said, the concept, even with all the issues, is fantastic and revolutionary. It's as big a game changer for us as the LED blinkie or indexed shifting.
OK, I'm obviously just past my virginity with this stuff and now we're hearing from the veterans who have plumbed the depths and found all of the pros and cons. Good to know there's already been this much development. I'm sure there are all sorts of pros and cons to all of 'em and I'm certainly willing to entertain the notion that Map My Ride is the soulless and corrupt Microsoft of the whole "industry". Having just discovered that spreadsheets exist, as it were, though, I'm far from comparing Lotus and Excel and determining all of the pros and cons. I'm just thrilled as hell to know that spreadsheets exist. As usual, well after other people are power users!

Oh well, I'm looking forward to downloading some maps or GPS files from SOMEWHERE the next time I'm out of town and sampling some local riding knowledge through the wonders of the internets.

-Ray

[konstantkarma]

I use bikely dot com pretty extensively. I do not have a GPS on my bicycle, so I can't comment on interfaces between that and other sites.

Bikely is pretty nice, but it is a bit slow sometimes. It has thousands of routes all over the world, some described in very fine detail. Unfortunately, the site does rely on the conscientious input of the user, and that can be a bit irksome. Sometimes you'll find a nice route that someone did a really poor job of documenting, resulting in a poor or non-existent cue sheet. The onther thing that bugs me about the site it that there is no notification mechanism for people commenting on your routes in the Bikely forum. It would be nice to give feedback, or receive it when needed

I have about 20 routes mapped, most with good cue sheets over routes that I have ridden, and in most cases double checked. My routes are mainly in Colorado, Central Maryland, and Southern /Central Pennsylvania. My bikely name is "soinclined", so if you search under "Maryland" and find that name that you can pull down all of these routes for examples.

Bikely-soinclined (http://www.bikely.com/listpaths/by/soinclined)

Some of these rides are in the Interstate 95 corridor, and therefore readily accessible to people living in Philly/Jersey/DC etc.

[Ray]

I've been checking them out over the last couple of days and Bikely seems to be winning. Primarily because its very easy to download the routes to a GPS. MMR has a somewhat more intuitive interface, but when I try to download a ride in GPX format, it saves it with that extension but in a different format that my GPS doesn't recognize. Both of them have plenty of good routes. I know all sorts of routes in Southeast PA, but am primarily interested for when I'm out of town and want to check out some nice riding in areas I'm not familiar with.

But I'll check out some of your rides - there are areas around here I don't know that well and can always get some new ideas.

-Ray

[Clydesdale]

but I have had fun playing with g-maps - http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

The idea of being able to share routes or find routes in other locations posted by locals is awesome.

[rdparadise]

Well, I used Bikely a couple of weeks ago to put a ride together from my house to Greenwich NJ. Unfornately, I only have the garmin 305 so I cannot upload the file. Tried to export/import it to google maps and couldn't make that work either.

Therefore, I ended up redoing it in google maps and printing the route down and back separately. Turn by turn, accurate mileage and no issues for a printed cue sheet. Although I did copy and paste into Excel and reformatted. It took all of about 30 minutes. In my old days I used to spend hours, driving the car, mapping rides and then putting them into excel for club rides. Now, it's a dream in comparison.

Anybody have any suggestions on using Bikely and getting a printed cue sheet? I'd love to figure it out.

Thanks,

Bob

[palincss]

Anybody have any suggestions on using Bikely and getting a printed cue sheet? I'd love to figure it out.


When you create a route by drawing it (as opposed to uploading gps data) you have to type in the descriptions of the turns into the "Notes" area. Bikely won't capture the road name data from the google map API. If you have "follow roads" checked, you click points on the road and it will follow. (There are tricks to this, as sometimes it wants to follow a short cut rather than your route, and sometimes you will end up with little out-and-back detours. There are even some turns it simply will not follow, for no obvious reason.)

When you're all done and you describe and save the route, go ahead and bring it up. In the upper left under "Show" you'll get three choices, for the whole route, elevation profile or cue sheet. You can print that cue sheet directly, or you can copy it and paste it into a spreadsheet to reformat it. Or, if you do this a lot, as I do, you can create yourself a program to manipulate the copied and pasted data and write it out as a spreadsheet.

[cullenking]

First off, thanks William and jchasse for the kind words about ridewithgps. We are working our butts off to get a more complete feature set as soon as possible! Zack and I are just finishing the last of our school responsibilities, so a serious push of game changing features is about to happen.

We are well aware of the lack of content on rwgps, which is why I cooked up the import from bikely/mapmyride feature. I wanted two things: give people an easy way to try the service without investing much time, and also to get a bunch of content without people spending time recreating the wheel. We seem to be getting some momentum, and will reach a tipping point (hopefully soon!) where the growth of content will greatly increase.

The complaints people have been making about the map my ride service have acted as the catalyst for our renewed dedication to make ridewithgps the best biking resource on the internet. It really doesn't take too much: treat users with respect, satisfy their need for features and don't cram a huge quantity of ads down their throats!

With that being said, we understand there are some areas where we are lacking which are essential to rising above and beyond the competition. Better cue sheet creation, more fine grained control of export features (such as altering time for rides to import into your GPS unit, meaning you get yelled at for going slower than last time, etc...), more intelligent GPX/TCX importation (handle multiple tracks in one file) and a much more featureful planner to name a few. Currently Zack is working on some really cool analysis stuff that should be a fantastic tool for the dedicated rider in training. Finally, Cam has a beautiful redesign of our user interface which should show a much more professional and clean image of our project.

palincss: I completely agree with your assessment of NavTeq and TeleAtlas. This is why during the last re-write of the route planner and viewer, I made it modular. Soon, users will be able to pick between either google or yahoo maps. Both are great tools to work with their own pros and cons. Keep an eye out over the next month or two to see that in action.

I am rambling a bit, however I want to convey that we care about our users and their needs. We are happy to hear any suggestions, criticisms or feature requests from anyone; if it's a good idea and it's doable, chances are we will be happy to put it in the feature queue! Additionally, our goal is to turn this site into our full time job. When we are able to not worry about anything but ridewithgps, the speed of development should increase dramatically! So, please come stop by, play around and give us a chance. If you miss a particular feature, let us know so we can get it going for you and others to enjoy.

[BumbleBeeDave]

. . .and as others have mentioned, MMR is full of annoying popup ads that really turned me off. Having to pay to print a map also irks me.

For Bikely I do screen shots of the cue sheet, elevation profile, and map, then save as JPEG and dump onto an InDesign page. I usually do multiple screen shots of the map at a higher mag, then paste them together in Photoshop fior a higher resolution map. Four screen shots pasted together usually gives a really good resolution map and only takes a few minutes in Photoshop to paste together.

The only quirks that bother me with Bikely are that I usually map out the route, then go back and do the cues. If you do that make SURE you turn off the drawing tool or if you're trying to activate a cue point and miss, then all of a sudden you've entered another cue point and the program may connect it to the end point of your route with several hundred more cue points, then you have to erase them one by one.

The other quirk is that if you're using the "follow road automatically" feature and are not careful, the program may follow a road you don't want to use to get you where you're going on the map.

But overall, I find Bikely to be far superior to MMR. GAWD I hate those pop-up floating ads!

BBD

[velotel]

I've used a few of the mapping sites and was at first thrilled with ridewithgps; the speed there is terrific but then so is the speed using gmaps. And for sure the floating ad at maymyride is a pain and it can be slow at times but there's one aspect that mapmyride is so much better at doing than the others that I always end up back at mapmyride, namely verticals. Mapmyride is relatively close to the real verticals on rides while the two others I've named are so far off that it's a joke. For example a recent ride I did that ended up with 3650 meters of climbing according to mapmyride had something like 3x that number at the other two. And yes, I know ridewithgps is only in feet so I translated the feet from ridewithgps into metric. I'd of course love to think I could ride that much vertical in such a short distance but unfortunately I can't.
Hence if all I'm doing is checking distances, I'll use ridewith or gmaps for their speed but if I want a somewhat accurate vertical I use mapmyride. I also like the option with mapmyride to use walking directions instead of follow roads because sometimes roads I ride refuse to be acknowledged as roads by any of the sites but with maymyride I can turn off follow roads and turn on walking directions and voila the road is followed. As soon as I'm past that section or that road, I turn follow roads back on and I'm off.

[paczki]

When you create a route by drawing it (as opposed to uploading gps data) you have to type in the descriptions of the turns into the "Notes" area. Bikely won't capture the road name data from the google map API. If you have "follow roads" checked, you click points on the road and it will follow. (There are tricks to this, as sometimes it wants to follow a short cut rather than your route, and sometimes you will end up with little out-and-back detours. There are even some turns it simply will not follow, for no obvious reason.)

This is very easy to do actually, you just enter in a Note -- "Sharp right onto Staines Street" for example -- at each intersection as you draw the ride. And voila, at the end you have a cue sheet.

[onekgguy]

I put together this screencast (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVR5mkYsCIE) recently using RideWithGPS.

I don't know about you but when I get 40 to 50 miles from home I tend to not stray off on roads I'm unfamiliar with; I pretty much stay with what I know. Having my Edge with me gives me the go-ahead to explore more than ever before.

Kevin g

[Ray]

I've used a few of the mapping sites and was at first thrilled with ridewithgps; the speed there is terrific but then so is the speed using gmaps. And for sure the floating ad at maymyride is a pain and it can be slow at times but there's one aspect that mapmyride is so much better at doing than the others that I always end up back at mapmyride, namely verticals. Mapmyride is relatively close to the real verticals on rides while the two others I've named are so far off that it's a joke. For example a recent ride I did that ended up with 3650 meters of climbing according to mapmyride had something like 3x that number at the other two. And yes, I know ridewithgps is only in feet so I translated the feet from ridewithgps into metric. I'd of course love to think I could ride that much vertical in such a short distance but unfortunately I can't.
Hence if all I'm doing is checking distances, I'll use ridewith or gmaps for their speed but if I want a somewhat accurate vertical I use mapmyride. I also like the option with mapmyride to use walking directions instead of follow roads because sometimes roads I ride refuse to be acknowledged as roads by any of the sites but with maymyride I can turn off follow roads and turn on walking directions and voila the road is followed. As soon as I'm past that section or that road, I turn follow roads back on and I'm off.
That's interesting - my limited experience is completely the opposite. I've entered rides with all sorts of steep climbs and the elevation profile on MMR shows nothing bigger than 3%! I did a 42 mile ride today that ridewithgps showed at 4700 feet of vertical, which sounds about right, based on total climbing I'm aware of from other similar rides in the area. And when I look at the profile, the 10-15% grades actually show up right where I KNOW they're located on the course.

Another compliment to ridewithgps - I emailed the two guys putting it together with a question and it turned out it led to an oversight on their part in one of the page designs. Cullen found the problem and got back to me right away and indicated he'll fix it in the next few days. Highly responsive folks. And I like the interface a lot better than Bikely or MMR so far. But all of 'em work, from what I can tell.

-Ray

[velotel]

That's interesting - my limited experience is completely the opposite. I've entered rides with all sorts of steep climbs and the elevation profile on MMR shows nothing bigger than 3%! I did a 42 mile ride today that ridewithgps showed at 4700 feet of vertical, which sounds about right, based on total climbing I'm aware of from other similar rides in the area. And when I look at the profile, the 10-15% grades actually show up right where I KNOW they're located on the course.

-Ray

I usually check the verticals provided against the verticals in a series of books on cols here in the Alps, Atlas des Cols, and against the numbers from this site http://ciclismo.sitiasp.it/motore.aspx?da=az just to see if the numbers are in the ballpark. Maybe ridewithgps has a problem with roads here in Europe because the numbers are so far off that it's a joke. On the other hand the profile they show looks right on though whether their percentages are accurate or not I don't know; the numbers are too small for me. Maymyride used to be horrible for verticals but they've gotten much better to the point that I'll use them most of the time even though the site is a pain and often slow. If ridewithgps manages to start producing better numbers for the verticals I'll use them in a flash because their site is much better and way faster. Maymyride is also a step up on the others because of their use walking directions option which works great on roads that for whatever reason the follow roads option refuses to acknowledge as roads, like the back side of the col above my house that the Dauphiné Libéré will race over on the 14th.

[Ray]

I usually check the verticals provided against the verticals in a series of books on cols here in the Alps, Atlas des Cols, and against the numbers from this site http://ciclismo.sitiasp.it/motore.aspx?da=az just to see if the numbers are in the ballpark. Maybe ridewithgps has a problem with roads here in Europe because the numbers are so far off that it's a joke. On the other hand the profile they show looks right on though whether their percentages are accurate or not I don't know; the numbers are too small for me. Maymyride used to be horrible for verticals but they've gotten much better to the point that I'll use them most of the time even though the site is a pain and often slow. If ridewithgps manages to start producing better numbers for the verticals I'll use them in a flash because their site is much better and way faster. Maymyride is also a step up on the others because of their use walking directions option which works great on roads that for whatever reason the follow roads option refuses to acknowledge as roads, like the back side of the col above my house that the Dauphiné Libéré will race over on the 14th.
After working with it a little bit, ridewithgps is better than I thought. The ride I referred to yesterday that showed 4700 feet of climbing seemed a bit high to me, but seemed a LOT closer than the 1200 or so that MMR came up with, not to mention the specific grades were a lot closer to real than the max of 3% on MMR. But then I went in to edit the trip on ridewithgps and it told me that the number I'd been looking at was coming off of my GPS log (which is based on GPS elevation, not barometric) and it was high in comparison to their data for those roads. Their's was in the 3200 range, which seemed very believable. I was prepared to believe 4700 mostly because there was no way I was going to believe 1200 from MMR, but it seemed high given what I know about a local century that uses some of the same roads. 3200 I can believe pretty totally - I'd have guessed a little bit higher but not that much. I did another ride today and it did the same thing - correcting my gps log from about 3400 to 2800 for a hilly 30 mile ride.

I think I'm going to continue to look for rides in areas I'm visiting on MMR and Bikely just because of the critical mass of posted rides. But in terms of logging my own rides, I'm going to stick with ridewithgps.

-Ray

[cullenking]

Ray and velotel:

I am REALLY glad you gave a little criticism on here about the elevations stuff, since it caused me to roll up my sleeves and dive into the problem! Now, I am happy to say we have the most accurate representation of elevations of any application web or desktop, as of a week ago. I retroactively changed the numbers for all routes and trips on the site to reflect the new calculation methods. This was easy, since we store the "raw" data, but use some cool math to calculate gain/loss/speed/etc figures and store those separate.

Here is a little idea of what the problem was, in as simple of terms as possible: a unit like the 305 has a barometric pressure based altimeter. This altimeter is accurate to +/- 1 foot or so. Additionally, it only reports the elevation in multiples of 0.48059 meters. So, at any point that is recorded, the unit is wobbling up and down by 1 or 2 meters. The Garmin display shows a rounded figure, but the log file the Garmin produces is the raw data with all that wobble up and down.

So, imagine you are riding on a perfectly flat road for 50 miles. Every 10 or so seconds your Garmin takes a point, and that point is either high or low by 1 or 2 meters. After your 50 mile perfectly flat ride, if you just simple add up the elevation differences between successive points, you can have 1000 or 2000 feet of elevation gain and loss! This is a big margin of error, as you reported.

Now, the other use case: clicking around on the map and drawing a preview route. We get the elevations from a set of files stored locally that were generated when the space shuttle Endeavor orbited the earth for 11 days. Those files have sub-meter accuracy for elevation, but they only have a point every 10 meters in the United States, and 30 meters outside of the US. Now, combine the fact there is 10/30 meters between the points with the fact that many rides you do are on curvy roads going up and around hills. With these rides, 10/30 meters to the left or right of the road could be a huge drop or gain, since the hill is steep! This up/down issue is now just like the flat-road-altimeter issue I just described, and causes inaccurate representations of gain and loss.

For those who get bored with math/tech, here is a summary of the solution: smooth the data with a sort of average, so that way if I have a point that is much higher or lower than the surrounding points, it adjusts down to a good value based on the surrounding points. Don't modify the original (never get rid of your raw data!), just update the gain and loss figures using this technique.

For those who like geeking out (nothing wrong with that, I get off on this kind of thing way too easy), here is details of the solution: apply aspects of Digital Signal Processing to the elevation data. This was like bringing a tank to a school yard fist fight, but hey, when you have the opportunity to play with a tank....In this example, the tank is a certain type of filter called a sinc filter. I played with Gaussian filters as well, but was more satisfied with the sinc filter. The sinc and gaussian filter technique (window filtering) is pretty easy to conceptualize if you have ever done a weighted average to figure out your grade at the end of a class. Just like different assignments weigh against your final grade based on size of the project, surrounding elevation points weigh against an average value for some center point by their proximity to that center. So, we basically walk along all the elevations in the route and look at say, the 5 points before and the 5 points after that value. This leaves is with a set of elevations:

[10, 11, 13, 12, 10, 12, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21]
............................^..................... ......
.........................center................... .....

We are computing what the center points average value is, so we need some set of weights to apply to the above set of 11 points.

[0.1, 0.13, 0.19, 0.23, 0.28, 0.23, 0.19, 0.13, 0.1]
.................................^................ ................
..............................center.............. ...............

First off, I just made these numbers up to illustrate the concept: real values would sum to 1, but I am too lazy to make real values :) Notice three things: the center weight is the highest because it is the most relevant (closest), how the values to the right mirror those on the left, and how the further away from the center we get the smaller the weight gets. This is because the points further away from the center matter less in our calculation of what the center value should be! So, we are just generating a set of weights, with weight correlating to distance from center. This type of filter is called a windowed filter (since we have a 'window' of 11 points we are working with). Variations include sinc and gaussian filters: those are just different kinds of math equations to generate those weights, but the concept is the same.

If you want more details, including code, I wrote up a summary on my blog at http://cullenking.com/ complete with graphs!

I guess to wrap it up, I wanted to let everyone know that we are big numbers geeks that REALLY enjoy working with these fun tools and technology, and love making an application that you guys find worthwhile. It helps that we love cycling as well ;) Keep up with the criticisms, suggestions and feedback.

Oh, one last thing...I put together static map images of routes and trips! So now when you draw a route, we make an image of that route drawn on a map. Currently there are two sizes, 480x480 and a 100x100 thumbnail. We will implement custom sizes, layouts etc when we start figuring out premium account stuff. Here is an example of both:

http://ridewithgps.com/trips/94/full.gif

http://ridewithgps.com/trips/94/thumb.gif

Sorry for the long post! Edited to fix my ghetto number charts!

[paczki]

That's great. I've just signed up and am importing my Bikely library.