EveryTrail Blog

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

Today the New York Times published a great article about GPS Drawing featuring three EveryTrail members.

Below are screen shots of the EveryTrail trips that the article is referring to.

An Imaginary Portrait of prof. Wrona:

Fleur de Fort:

SPC INVDR – Bicycle GPS Drawing:

I zrobil karpia…:

Badzielec’s Uncle:

Congrats Powonie, Cham101, and mexist!

EveryTrail has been growing through word of mouth since we launched the site in October 2006. In April 2007, 6 months after launch we crossed 1,000 trips, and in May 2008 we passed the 10,000 mark.

Last Friday EveryTrail reached another big milestone: More than 100,000 public trips are shared at EveryTrail!

The image shows the daily number of new trips. There are no signs of slowing down. Quite the contrary… lately the number of new trips has grown faster than ever, and we had several days with more than 1,000 new trips.

We at EveryTrail are celebrating this milestone, but at the same time we keep focusing on making the site better and better, while dealing with some growing pains.

On to the next milestone!

EveryTrail is growing fast. We saw the first day with over 1,000 uploaded trips in April (yes, that’s right, 1,000 unique, personal travel experiences IN ONE DAY!), and we are fast approaching 100,000 publicly shared trips.

We’ve been working hard at keeping up with all this growth in traffic and content. We made important upgrades to the server infrastructure and migrated to a new scalable framework to prepare for the next wave of growth.

Along with the growth came some growing pains. Since this morning GPS file uploads are not working. While we are resolving this please use the following temporary fix:

This way you should be able to continue uploading trips.

To stay up-to-date on our progress, please follow EveryTrail on Twitter: Twitter.com/EveryTrail