Runstoppable Blog

Hi everyone…

We’ve been having performance issues on our servers lately, as many have noticed.  Specifically, some graphs haven’t been displaying properly and the site occasionally returns an “Error 400″.  We’re trying to work with our hosting company in order to solve these problems, but if all else fails we’re making plans to move the site elsewhere.

Meanwhile, we’ve been working pretty hard on the next version of Runstoppable.  When will it be out?  When it’s ready, of course

After a couple months, we’ve received over 50 responses to our feature survey. This is great, and we’re going to be using your feedback to help shape the future of this site. Although we’re going to continue to check the survey results in the near future, I’m going to go ahead and describe some of the most clear consensus opinions to come out of the survey.

Popular Feature Ideas:

• Running Goals - This is definitely on our list, though we need to spend some time figuring out exactly what sorts of goals we want to be able to track. Look for another post on this later.
• Running History as a Calendar - Coming Soon
• Multiple Training Types (running, biking, etc) - This has been missing from Runstoppable for a while, and we’re working out the details on some ways to deal with it. Look for big changes in version 1.6.
• Public Route Directory - Definitely on our to-do list, but there are a lot of policy decisions to be made in the meantime since your privacy is important to us.

Notable things left in the “Additional Comments” section:

• The ability to cut up routes, edit routes, etc would be useful a lot of the time. This is something we’re working on, but we’re going to be careful to not make the route editor really complicated for normal users, too.
• A public route directory would be really cool
• The ability to plan your runs (creating a training schedule) on a calendar would be cool.
• Lots more good ideas…

Almost everything that has been popular in the survey and comments is planned for future versions of Runstoppable, so stay tuned.

As always, keep that feedback coming…

Some of you may be asking yourself, “self, when is Runstoppable.com, my most favoritest website for logging runs finally going to update?” Well, stop talking to yourself, because today is your lucky day! So without further ado, I present to you the new features of Runstoppable version 1.4!

We’ve revamped the Welcome Page, to give you a dashboard to some of the most basic parts of the site. You can now view some of the site news, as well as your recent runs and recent routes. And what dashboard would be complete without a pretty graph?

There’s a new experimental version of the Route Editor out. You can take it for a spin and use it all you like, but send us feedback so we know if you like it! Or if you hate it, let us know why!

You can now also Import A Route from certain GPS Devices. This is an experimental version, and currently supports GPX and KML formats for the data. Most GPS devices can convert their data to one of these formats. Please let us know if you have a device that doesn’t seem to work with our data importer!
Forget Tony Danza, you’re now the boss when it comes to your route distance! Think we’re wrong about you’re route only being .999999 miles? Its ok, you can make it 1 mile now if you want.

You thought we’d forget, but now we’ll remember you were logged in if you want us to. You’ll always have a special place in our hearts, and in our database.

You might even notice some other things different about the site, like the relocated dashboard tabs, and some updated images here and there. We’re always tweaking things, so keep an eye out, and let us know if anything should be changed.

Please take a minute or two to answer our Feature Survey. It’s only 13 questions and will help us make future versions of Runstoppable better for you!

We’ve been working on our next version of Runstoppable for a while, and we just wanted to give you a taste of some of the things we’re working on for version 1.4, so here goes

One of the big things we’re doing for this version is a beta version of a new route editor. Based on some feedback we’ve gotten, we’re redesigning some of the layout of the route editor to make it easier to use and more self explanatory. A big part of this is removing the tabs which aren’t as intuitive as we had earlier hoped. Soon, all the tools for generating routes will be laid out right in front of you, just a single click away.

Another change we’re developing is a new welcome page. The existing page is the stepping stone to the grander scheme of a dashboard where you can quickly see your recent activity, view updates to your groups, and jump into your routes. We have some big plans for it that you’re bound to find useful.

We’re also doing tons of other things on the site, from facelifts and graphical tweaks, to allow the importing of more GPS data, to giving you the option to stay logged in across visits.

All that aside, we’re still looking to you, our users, for more feedback. Tell us what you love! Tell us what you hate! And most importantly, tell us how we can make Runstoppable more useful to you! We’ve opened up a separate forum (click “Feature Requests” from the Forums tab) just for you to tell us what you want us to work on. So jump on the forums and drop us a line!

Well, as per usual, this release took us longer than we expected, but we’ve got a lot of new features that we think are pretty exciting. Ths first thing you might notice is that the route editor has changed a fair amount. We’ve added support for 20 more countries, got a bunch of new map data, let you zoom in and out more, and chain multiple routes together.

As was mentioned before, we’ve updated our statistics tab to be more interactive… watch this area for continued improvement.

We also made a lot of changes based upon user feedback. People asked to be able to see things in kilometers, track the mileage on their shoes, and save their routes more quickly. All of these things are now possible.

Mostly for fun, we even let you export your route to a 3-dimensional view of the globe using Google Earth (pictured).

We’ve also improved the groups system, letting you post any of your routes to your groups to share with friends. You’ll also find improved group administration in the new version.

We hope you’ll enjoy this release, and we look forward to hearing about what you like and dislike.

The upcoming version of Runstoppable will include the long-awaited upgrade of the statistics system. This encompasses three new features:

• Much more readable graphs
• The ability to click a bar in the graph and see the related runs
• A graph for each route showing the pace on recent runs

A preliminary version of the first two items is shown below (click the picture to see full size):

A couple of the features we have planned (and some in progress) for later versions:
- Printable graphs
- Easy graph customization

We’re still finishing up version 1.2.. hopefully it’ll be out within a week (I’ve been saying that for a while, though…)

We’re hoping to complete another version of Runstoppable (1.2) early next week. This release will bring a lot of behind-the-scenes changes that I won’t bother talking about, but some more interesting ones, as well. For example, if you’re a part of a group, you’ll be able to take any route you’ve created and listed in the “shared routes” for that group. We’ve also updated our mapping software to use the latest version of Google Maps. This means better performance, some better satellite imagery (in some areas), and maps for a large portion of Europe. We’re investigating expansion into more countries.

A big change you’ll notice is the new statistics system. While we don’t expect the released system to be a complete realization of our ideas for statistics, this will be a big step in the right direction. Expect cleaner-looking graphs that are interactive: for example, if you ran 30 miles on a certain week, you’ll be able to click on that week in the chart and view the relevant runs. A more detailed description will be on here as we get closer to release.

Another change will be the introduction of text-based advertising to some parts of the site. We’re trying to do this in a way that will not be obtrusive to our users, and will provide ads that are relevant to runners. Most pages still won’t have any advertisements. This is being done in order to offset our costs. Runstoppable has been under development since last August. At $10/month for hosting, that’s $90 so far, plus we spent $45 to license some software for the new statistics system. Our goal (at this point) is not to make a living off this, we just want to offset our costs. Feel free to contact us via the site if you have questions or concerns about this.

With over 500 users registered so far, we’re always curious who’s using the site. With this in mind, I created a big map of the world with an icon for each unique route starting location. In order to protect our users’ privacy, I reduced the precision of the markers, so that there won’t be a marker on your house, but it should be within a mile or two.

Runstoppable’s Users

Meanwhile, we’ve been working on a new statistics system and better forum support for the upcoming version. I’ll have a preview up here once we get a bit closer. It should be a big step forward.

Elevation graphs seem to be back… hopefully that won’t happen again.