EveryTrail Blog

As you may have noticed, we recently launched EveryTrail Destinations and continued to focus on making them as useful as possible for the community.

To start, we have added a map-based browsing system to help you find destinations nearby.  You start out with a world map, divided into continents and regions:

Once you click on a continent, you will see a list of countries for that continent, and you will eventually land at a page like this (This is the California page):

You can see all locations on the map, and as you zoom in, you will see the boundaries of the destinations.  Click a region on the map to reach the destination detail page, or look through the links below the map.  We hope that this feature will provide a more useful browsing experience when searching for new nearby destinations.

Now, onto improvements for the individual destination pages…

For example, check out the Yosemite National Park destination page.  On it, you will find a descriptive overview, a map with popular trips, guides, trips, popular activities, active users, tips, reviews, a place to ask questions, driving directions, and weather.  Let’s take a look at some of the recent additions this week in more detail:

Ask a Question or Write a Review

We see Destinations as the best place to get information on a particular location, so we have added the ability to ask a question or write a review.

If you have been to a destination (you can see destinations you have been to on your profile page), it would help the EveryTrail community if you could post a short message with suggestions or any information that would help other travelers.  If you are planning a trip, ask questions! We have many active users who are more than willing to share experiences and answer your questions.  Active users will receive emails when you post questions, and you should get responses soon.

Subscribe to a Destination

You can subscribe to a destination (by default, you will be subscribed to any destination in which you have been active, i.e. created a trip).  Subscribing to a destination means that you will receive updates in your activity feed emails (either once per day or once per week) which will include new trips in the destination, or new comments, questions, or reviews.  You can edit your subscription preferences by going to Account Settings, on the Notifications tab.

Tips

We have added a feed of tips from the trips in destinations.  This will automatically be pulled from any trip created within the destination bounds.  So look out for those tips (bottom of the page), and please add some tips when creating trips to help others when they are planning new adventures.

Guides

Like the trip list, we have added a list of Guides related to the destination.  These will provide a more objective description of particular areas or trails, compared to the more personal accounts provided in trips.  They will also include driving directions, tips, and more details than trips usually do.

Wikipedia blurb

We have added Wikipedia blurbs to many of the destinations, for the case where a destination does not yet have an overview added.  If you are an expert on a particular location, please create a new destination or edit an existing one to provide more information.

As you may have read in our previous post, we have recently added the ability to add geotagged videos to your EveryTrail trips.  The easiest way to do this is by using the EveryTrail Pro iPhone app, where you can take videos just as you would take pictures (note the picture/video toggle when in the camera view), and then upload them to your YouTube account.

However, many of you may have videos taken from other cameras or saved from previous trips, so this post is a guide to adding videos on your computer (or YouTube) to your trips. Please note that it is not as seamless as using the iPhone app, because YouTube does not store timestamp information with their videos (don’t ask me why).

After you import your track, give your trip a title and tell your story, you will have the option to add photos or videos to your trip, and the page looks something like this:

Once you click the “Import from YouTube” link you will be asked to log in to your YouTube account and grant EveryTrail access to your videos list.  Then you will arrive at a page showing all of your videos:

Select the videos you want to import (you can preview them on this page to make sure you import the ones you want).  You will then arrive at the geotagging page, where we will show you all photos and videos (by showing the photos it helps  to geotag the videos in the correct location):

Unfortunately, YouTube does not save the date taken time of the video, which makes it impossible to automatically geotag them.  There are 2 solutions to this:

1) You can edit a videos information, including the date it was taken (You can find the date taken information by looking at the properties of the video on your computer).  You can reach this page by going to My Videos (found from your Profile Page).

2) You can manually tag them as you would photos by clicking the “map it” button.

Of course, if your video was geotagged on YouTube already, we will preserve that information.

Once you have geotagged all of your photos and videos, your trip is ready.  Here is how your videos will look playing playing on the website (Note: actual subject matter may vary):

*Please note that we currently order all photos and videos by the time they were taken.  Because YouTube does not save the time information (they may save the date), your videos may appear all together, either before or after the photos (even if they are geotagged between photos).  To correct this, edit the time information of your videos.  In the future we will provide an easier way to edit the timestamps of the videos based on their position on the track compared to other photos.

We have recently added a new feature that will make saving, finding, and following trips even easier: Favorites. From the Website, you can favorite a trip by clicking the “Add to favorites” link on the top right of the trip detail page:

Once added to your favorites, you will be able to see the trip using the EveryTrail iPhone app. We now sync your My Trips and Favorite Trips lists between the website and the iPhone, and you can add a trip to your favorites from the iPhone as well.

Going to The Grand Canyon soon? check out the destination page and browse the popular trips in that area. When you find a few that interest you, simply add them to your favorites list and you can browse them later on your iPhone.

Once you are on your trip, take out your phone to get driving directions to the trailhead, or follow the route on the map while creating a new EveryTrail trip.

It’s the best way to keep track of trips that you want to try later. So go out there and add some trips to your favorites and share your adventures!

Starting today EveryTrail trips can be made even more exciting with the addition of video.

Just like photos, videos will be added to your trip and pinned to the map at the location they were captured.

Currently this feature is available with EveryTrail PRO for iPhone. (click here for more info on the latest version, and click here to purchase EveryTrail PRO from iTunes).

Don’t have an iPhone? Don’t worry, we are adding video import from YouTube shortly, so ALL trips and members can benefit from the added interactivity.

Here are some early examples of trips with video:

As always, we’ll continue to improve the video feature, so please let us know your feedback in the Forums.

We are very excited to announce our latest creation: EveryTrail Destinations. Destinations aggregate trips, photos, and people for any given area, for example Yosemite National Park, Hong Kong Island, San Francisco Bay Area, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, to name a few. Destinations create a more meaningful grouping of trip content than we’ve ever seen before at EveryTrail, and as you can see the pages combine lots of useful information into one neatly organized page.

For you, the EveryTrail user, the introduction of Destinations simply means that it will become easier, more fun and more useful to browse and search EveryTrail. It will also give you a platform to discuss destinations, ask questions to destination Gurus, and help the community out by sharing your knowledge and tips.

We are launching with several hundreds of destinations, and we hope to ramp this up to thousands of global destinations. As always we need your help with that. Here’s how you can get involved:

• Become a “Destination Ranger” and maintain, moderate and edit existing destination pages.
• Share your reviews, comments, and tips for destinations you know and love
• Help us create new destinations, for example in your local area
• Create more, higher quality trips, including photos, descriptions and captions

We look forward to seeing your contributions.

We have some exciting news: groups are now available!  You may have noticed that this feature has been available for a while now; we were keeping it in a very unexposed state until we added some more functionality.  Here’s what you need to know:

• Groups are a great way to form your own social circles on EveryTrail, whether is it a small number of close friends that you hike or cycle with every week, a larger regional community (such as Yosemite National Park), or a group based on a common interest (Photography, Berlin, or Trail Mix).
• You can add your trips to groups on the tell story page (on the right side below the map you should see a list of your groups).  These trips will appear in the group trip list.
• We have also added a discussion board/feed to the groups so that you can discuss topics more privately than you would be able to on the forums.
• Invite your friends to join your groups (or to join EveryTrail)

Here is the Groups section of EveryTrail.  At the top is a featured group (right now it’s the EveryTrail team group, but this will change over time).  Here you can see a list of recent groups, groups you are a member of, and you can also search for groups by keyword.

So now you’re saying, “Ok, you got me.  I’m excited and I want to create a group and invite all of my friends!!”  Well this is how you do it:

To create a group, click the “Create now” button and you will come to this page:

You can select a name (NOTE: you cannot change this later), description, privacy settings, and upload an optional relevant group photo (recommended).  From here you can invite friends to your group by clicking the “Invite” link on the group details page.  For now you can search by name, username, and email address.

Finally, here is your new group page, complete with group information, discussions, a list of members, trips, and an overview map of all trips in your group:

Create a group, invite your friends, and stay connected to each other when you get back from your various adventures.  Suggestions/Comments welcomed and appreciated.

Happy Trails,

-Chris

As many of you have probably realized, we have had an open API for some time now.  There are several iPhone apps out there (Trails among others) allow users to post their trips to EveryTrail.  Until this point we had never advertised the API, but have provided it for interested parties.  Now we have decided to open it up to all other developers.

Please go to http://www.everytrail.com/developer to find out more.  As of right now, you must request an API key and we will look over the description of the application.  In most cases we will approve it right away.  Here is what the developers’ area looks like:

Right now these are the features you will be able to use:

- Account creation: users can sign up for EveryTrail through your application

- Account login

- Trip creation: including title, description, tips, activity, etc.

- Photo upload: with geotagging and adding to a trip

Searching and Downloading of existing trips is restricted for right now, but please contact us (api at globalmotion dot com) and we can work something out.

As you are all probably well aware, we continue to try to bring you new features and provide the best way to share your trips and experiences.  We hope that by allowing others to use out API we can focus more on sharing and discovering trips than keeping up to date with all the various mobile devices out there.

To find documentation for the API, visit http://devwiki.everytrail.com

Happy Trails,

-Chris

We launched a new version of the EveryTrail trip widget a while ago and many of you voiced your opinions and suggestions, both positive and negative.  We worked tirelessly trying to take all of your feedback into consideration as we released updates about every other day for a while, but in the end we found out that we have a very diverse set of users, who all use EveryTrail for different (sometimes almost mutually exclusive) reasons.  We have a large group of users who love seeing their photos geotagged and want to sit back and watch photo after photo pop up so that they can relive their trips; there are just as many users who want to see intricate details in their stats: the elevation at a particular point, and their speed while riding up that final hill.  And there are even more users who want to see trips without a slideshow of photos or stat charts obstructing the map.

We have spent some time optimizing each of these 3 situations and have added widget preferences to your account settings so that you can personalize the trips you share and the trips you view.

Here’s how it works:

Go to the Profile tab at the top of the page > Edit Preferences

Then scroll down to the widget preferences:

We first look at the how you want to view other trips.

If you select “Default” it will default to whatever the trip creator wants to show his or her trip. Photos will show a slideslow if there are pictures in the trip, statistics will show the charts and trip stats, and the map mode will just show the track on the map (as large as possible).

If the trip owner also chooses “default” than the trip will be shown as a slideshow if pictures are present in the trip, and otherwise will be shown with statistics.  For most people “Default” will likely be the best option, but we wanted to give you all the chance to override the default settings for those stats and map junkies among us.

I know we have said this many times, but please keep the comments, suggestions, and bug reports coming in.  We are making more of an effort to keep everyone updated on new features through our blog and forum, but it helps us track down hidden issues that only a few users face. Many of you have had some great suggestions and a few of them are in the works right now.  We apologize if we don’t get to them right away, we just have a long list of things we want to add and only so much time to do it.

Thanks for your continued support and happy trails!

-Chris