Complete MyOutdoors.net redesign coming soon, including elevation profiles and full text search

In the words of the immortal Rakim, "it's been a long time." We're deep into a complete, ground-up, redesign of MyOutdoors.net including a lot of new features. The redesign's sole purpose is making the site more intuitive and usable. The end result is going to be a much bigger map, easier navigation, including for lower resolution displays, and a lot less information overload, plus a lot of new features. Best of all, you can create maps and play around with the editor before creating a user. Here's a quick screenshot of the new homepage:

There are a few things that aren't showing up right now, such as the comments below the map, and a link to view the elevation profile. There is also navigation in the top journal entries section that allows you to browse the most popular journals without leaving the page. One nice thing about the elevation profile is it's going to be an actual image generated using gd instead of something using javascript or flash so you can download it and use it for whatever you want (and yes, for the more savvy users you could take a screenshot using the other methods as well. We're hoping this will make things a little more usable for the masses). I'm hoping there won't be problems with server load due to the elevation profile if the site ever gets popular though...

There were some big issues with the old site that have been fixed as well, including editing of maps with over 60 or so waypoints. That should all be taken care of now. There will also be a bunch of different kinds of map markers such as invisible ones, camping sites, information markers, and warning markers, as well as the original flags.

We've also added GPX uploading to the site. My brother has a great map of a 35 mile hike he took in Wyoming. The elevation profile looks fantastic, showing 3 well defined peaks. There are a few blips in the elevation data from his GPS unit, but overall it's pretty impressive.

The last big thing we're adding is full text search so you can find anything in the title, description, or comments for the journal entries. This will then be integrated into Google Co-op so you can see MyOutdoors.net search results in your browser. I've been wanting to do that for a while :)

I think that's about it. It's basically going to be a completely new site. Check back soon to see it, hopefully we'll have it up by October.

UW-Madison Running Club's 13th Annual Fall 15K!

We just added a course map for the UW-Madison Running Club's 13th Annual Fall 15K Run. This is the only 15k in town and can also be run as a 3x5k relay. This race is at the beatiful Warner Park and is taking place on October 22, so the leaves should be just about at peak color. Enjoy the race!

2006 WTC Capitol Mile!

We recently put up the course layout for the 2006 Wisconsin Track Club Capitol Mile on MyOutdoors.net. This is another local race in Madison, WI, taking place on Sunday July 23rd. The race takes place at the beautiful capitol building and should be a really fun event.

Elver Park Firecracker Run!

MyOutdoors.net is working with KMR Media Partners to help promote the Elver Park Firecracker 10K/5K run here in Madison, WI. A portion of the proceeds from the run goes towards the Madison Parks Playground Equipment project. Elver park is actually really close to where we live, maybe a mile and a half, so we're pretty excited that we have an opportunity to apply the work that we've done for the site to benefit the community.

Happy running, and look for our fliers in your gift bags!

Sitemaps and MyOutdoors.net

Recently after we put up MyOutdoors.net I started playing around with Google Sitemaps. The service basically allows you to create a sitemap of your site that can be downloaded by search engines for help in indexing the site. I recently posted to the google-sitemaps group about some of my experiences with it because I've seen some oddities. The strangest thing that I've seen is that sometimes the date that the Sitemaps site lists as having last indexed MyOutdoors.net has actually gone back in time, from the 14th of June to the 7th.

The response from someone in the community said that others have seen similar behavior. The strangest thing is that the Sitemap on the site states that pages are updated daily. Since the site is designed for journaling outdoor activities, this seems reasonable, but it doesn't seem to be happening. Another oddity was that there were HTTP errors (because we took down the forum) as recently as the 16th, and the sitemap was downloaded as recently as yesterday, the 19th.

All of this wouldn't be a big deal until we get some content up, but eventually I want to incorporate Google Co-op so that searches in Google can return results from MyOutdoors.net directly in your search results. This can only happen if Google is indexing the site often enough for things to be up-to-date.

Stay tuned, and maybe soon we'll have full text search and Google Co-op integration.

New Header and Logo

We're starting to play around with the header on MyOutdoors.net and trying to get something a little better up there. We've been using iStockPhoto to try to find some decent images for the site, with marginal success. I haven't spent too much time on it yet, maybe I'll have some more time in the next few days. The one that's up there is decent but I'd like to get something better.

It was also a pain to manipulate the logo, username and password to go along with the image and get everything to a point where it was visible. You still can't see the login stuff too well, but I'm not sure how long we'll stay with that image so I'm not going to muck with it too much more. Oh, we also changed the logo to take out the texture so it's a little more readable. I've complained that it looks a bit plain now but not everyone agrees with me :)

More new additions

We received some much-needed feedback from members of the outdoors blogging community regarding the site and have started to incorporate it as we have time. Of most relevance is the addition of a small bit of text to the homepage of myoutdoors.net that actually describes the site. We've been meaning to do that for a while and just haven't gotten around to it. Thanks goes out to Tom at Two-Heel Drive, Glenn at anygeo.com, and Dylan at cyberhobo.net for their feedback.

There are still a ton of things that we're looking at doing with the site, including geo-RSS feeds (both import to journal entries and actual syndication) and GPX import. Stay tuned for more updates, and of course, please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.