EveryTrail Blog

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

We sent our brand new Mountain Hardwear EveryTrail T-Shirts to our contest winners around the world.

One of our long-time active users, Philipleets from Taiwan wrote a blog post about how he received his T-Shirt, all the way at the other end of the world!

Photos below:

Want a cool EveryTrail T-Shirt yourself? Stay tuned for more contests here!

We launched a much better way to search EveryTrail trips.

You can access the search page at http://everytrail.com/search.php, or click on advanced search next to the search button.

Advanced search enables you to search trips around a specific location.

You can choose a radius (e.g. trips within 25 miles of Palo Alto), activities (e.g. road biking, sightseeing), the trip length (e.g. trips from 10 to 20 miles) and trip duration (e.g. trips that take between 2 and 4 hours).

Over US Labor Day weekend more than 600 trips and 1600 geotagged photos were uploaded to EveryTrail!

The winners of our contest have been contacted and will receive their EveryTrail T-shirt soon. Congratulations!

Longest foot-powered trip (walk, hike, run etc)
Jordan River – Michigan, United States (20.8 miles, 33.4 km)

Most elevation gain in foot-powered trip
Mount Tamalpais Circumambulation – California, United States (Elevation gain: 6608 ft, 2014 m)

Longest bicycle trip (road biking, or mountain biking)
Nordjylland Rundt – Denmark (154.7 miles, 248.9 km)

Most elevation gain in bicycle trip
Karewendel & Wetterstein – Austria (Elevation gain: 12127 ft, 3696 m)

Longest trip on water (sailing, canoeing, etc)
Boston Harbor – Washington, United States (16.3 miles, 26.2 km)

Open category (3 winners): Outstanding trips as determined by our “panel of experts”.
Mustang Trekking – Nepal by bobwitlox: A beautiful 17-day trek through the remote Musting area in Nepal, with stunning pictures.

Larry and Joe’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Trip – Minnesota, United States by aviator_lms: A six day canoe trip through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.

Grinnell Glacier Trail – Montana, United States by kirt: The view from the trail is wide open with a great view of Grinnell Lake.

Binnthal – Alpe Veglia – Switzerland by Gregus_: A 2 day walk in the Binnthal (Switzerland) and Alpe Veglia National park (Italy) through the beautiful Alps.

Thanks all for being part of our ever growing global community!

EveryTrail is currently down because we are upgrading our 3Tera server grid.

We should be back up in a couple of hours.

UPDATE: We are back online. The site was offline for just under 4 hours. EveryTrail now runs at the newest 3Tera grid, so the site should be blazingly fast.

Thanks for your patience!

EveryTrail Team

We are working hard on launching EveryTrail version 2. Stay tuned, it’s coming soon. EveryTrail v2 incorporates hundreds of pieces of user feedback we received.

The improvements include the following:

• Easier, friendlier interface to view and create trips
• Easier method to geotag photos. Automatic geotagging was one of the better liked features, but also one that caused confusion. Our new user interface will make it easier.
• Larger thumbnail pictures, making the trips much nicer for sharing with friends
• “Social networking” features, including a nicer user profile page, easier ways to contact other users and much, much more.
• Search!!! Yes… We listened to you Many of you have asked, begged, or even demanded a better way to search trips. It’s coming!

While we completed the search & browse functionality we got a very positive surprise. We never really had an easy way to know from how many countries and states the trips at EveryTrail were coming. The answer surprised us…. (… drumroll… )… it turns out there are trips from 82 countries and 49 US states!

Wow, that’s a lot more than we thought! And the best news is that all these cool trips will be easily searchable very soon

EveryTrail will experience some down time when we switch over to version 2. We’ll keep you posted.

Our partners at Panoramio just announced that they agreed to be acquired by Google. Congrats to Eduardo, Joaquin and the team! Way to go guys, you are helping geotagging go mainstream.

EveryTrail users have been benefiting from Panoramio’s fast growing, global database of geotagged photos since we integrated the new Panoramio API earlier this year.

Panoramio users are essentially creating an entirely new “map layer”, that can be used by sites such as EveryTrail to not only show street maps and satellite images, but also what places look like through the eyes of other users. Taken together these layers are making the trip sharing and trip planning process an easier and more fun experience.

The acquisition will not effect the Panoramio service and API (other than providing resources to improve site performance, and probably make the database grow even faster), so as EveryTrail users you will continue to be able to use Panoramio photos to better illustrate your trips.