A slight lull in work coding for and supporting the professional peloton has allowed me to add some long-outstanding VeloViewer Explorer Tile features, namely the highlighting of newly ticked tiles for an activity in the Activities Map, along with total and new tile count columns.
On 26th September 2024, Strava announced “Segment Updates: Verified Segments, Decluttering and Leaderboard FAQ’s“. The goals are to remove duplicated as well as messy (bad GPS data) segments, tidy up the leaderboards (removing dodgy times) and to introduce “verified” segments. The result should be tidier segment lists for your Strava activities. Some of you will remember that in Jan 2021 almost all Zwift Virtual Ride segments were deleted (apart from Zwift-Insider’s segments used in the ZI leaderboard in VeloViewer ) which was a welcome relief to my API rate limits, given how many segments there used to be!
We have been eagerly awaiting the Men’s Tour of Britain having had a brilliant day out in Wrexham at the Women’s Tour of Britain back in June. With Remco Evenepoel, Julian Alaphilippe and Tom Pidcock all confirmed, it is set to be a fantastic event.
We were excited to learn early on in the race development that there would be a Stage in VeloViewer’s hometown of Sheffield, and it has been fun working with Rod Ellingworth (Race Director), Andy Hawes (Route Director) and their team over the last few months as they planned, recon’d and refined the routes.
A post at the geekier end of the spectrum as a couple of small changes to the VeloViewer Explorer Tile calculations are rolled out to fine tune some of those edge-case scenarios where tiles might have been missed. One key area was addressing the very rare occasions where your GPS device didn’t record a point in the required spot as your route crossed the very corner of a tile – the good news is this should now be sorted.
I’ve wanted to produce this view of VeloViewer Explorer Tiles since I first came up with the idea back in 2015 and can only put my lack of action down to being too busy with the professional teams these last few years! Simple idea though: provide a KML output that can be viewed in Google Earth shows a tower for each ticked Explorer Tile with the height representing the number of times the tile has been visited on your travels.
When I meet VeloViewer users out and about, the enjoyment of ticking off VeloViewer Explorer Tiles is the most common feedback I get. Since I came up with the idea of Explorer Tiles back in 2015 1000’s of VeloViewer users have been discovering new roads and trails close to where they live and further afield. A global heatmap of the ticked tiles has been on my to-do list since 2015 so it is embarrassing that it has taken so long to make it a reality! But wait no longer.
A new contender for the steepest paved road in the UK (or perhaps even in the world if we’re talking Tarmac road) has reared its head after Bamford Clough recently received a pristine layer of smooth Tarmac up its (unofficial) 36.5 % slopes. A few contenders for the world’s steepest street/road have popped up over recent years looking to topple New Zealand’s Baldwin Street (34.8 %) in Dunedin so will Bamford Clough be a possible contender?
If you are anything like me then looking back at photographs from past adventures brings all of those feelings rushing back. Whether it was of that ludicrous ride where you bit off far more than you could chew (I blame Simon Warren for most of those) or that image of the fantastic cafe stop when chewing was the highlight. With the integration of your Strava photos into VeloViewer you can now browse through all of your exploits on the map or thumbnail view with the added benefit of VeloViewer’s activity filtering to quickly narrow down the photos you want to see.
Yesterday (18th May 2020) Strava announced some major changes to their subscription model and what features its user will have if they aren’t subscribed. The main thing being non-subscribers can no longer view any segment leaderboards apart from the overall top 10 (including lists of their own efforts). There have also been some changes to the Strava API. Thankfully I/VeloViewer is in the fortunate position that Strava gave me a bunch of warning and hasn’t restricted my API access at all for Strava Subscribers and only the segment rankings/efforts aren’t available for non-subscribers bringing it in line with Strava’s own website/app. So if you are a Strava Subscriber (more than 70% of VeloViewer PRO users already are before this announcement) then there aren’t any changes at all in VeloViewer for you. For non-subscribers that are a few but 99% of the site continues to work as normal. Full details of the differences within VeloViewer for Strava Subscribers and non-Subscribers is available here.