VeloViewer Score – How Do You Measure Up?

VeloViewer ScoreThe VeloViewer Score is a composite measure providing a single value that represents your best Strava achievements.  This value can then be used to benchmark yourself against any other VeloViewer user around the world.  In this post I’ll explain how it is calculated and where your Score fits in against other VeloViewer users.

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Understanding Strava’s Enhanced Privacy Mode

Strava Request To FollowOver the last year I’ve had a number of people getting in touch (along with a couple of my own club mates) saying things along the lines of not needing to set up a Privacy Zone to hide where they live because they are using the Enhanced Privacy Mode in their Strava settings.  This is not the case.  The only ways to hide you home’s location on an activity will be by using a Privacy Zone, marking your activity as private or not uploading them to Strava at all!

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VeloViewer V3 is Alive and Kicking

V3 Summary PageThe blog has taken a bit of a back seat of late as I’ve attempted to get as many of the pages migrated across to the new Strava APIs as possible.  The previous version of VeloViewer was around a year old and had grown slowly over that period and the replacement version will follow a similar path.  Currently only the VeloFlow screen isn’t able to be migrated due to a few missing options in the new API but the majority of the rest of the site (and more) will be coming back on-line over the next few months.  Where possible I will be improving those pages as I migrate them and also adding some interesting new features. As it stands I’m rather thankful that I have managed to get access to the new API as it seems a large number of people in a similar position to myself haven’t and it looks like that is how it will be for the foreseeable future.

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What’s coming in Version 3 of VeloViewer

The Strava web services which are the backbone of VeloViewer are set to be replaced in the very near future with a much improved set. These new API’s will open up a huge amount of additional data to what I’ve had to play with previously and I’ll finally know who is actually visiting the site and display or hide data appropriately, First up though is a video I’ve put together of the new Activities page I’ve been working on that shows the new, very interactive cross-filtering functionality integrated with a new activity summary map. Sorry for the very poor narration skills:

Hopefully you’ll understand how these filters will work and how powerful they’ll be for you.

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Save the VeloFlow API!

VeloFlow Needs YouAs most of you will know Strava is moving to a new and improved version of their API (the way I get all my data from Strava to populate VeloViewer) and I’m currently working on VeloViewer to use this new version of Strava’s API. In general we are all going to be very excited by what the new API will offer us and I’ll go into that very soon in another post, but there is one sad bit of news – the main API that drives VeloFlow will no longer be available 🙁 This will mean that I will not be able to get the list of rides to display and I can’t think of another way to do it. So, the only hope I can see to keep VeloFlow going is to get all you good people to vote up and comment on my request to save the API on the Strava support site to show Strava how much you all want to keep VeloFlow running.

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VeloViewer Usability Survey

UsabilityTo continue the underlying driving force for VeloViewer (a playground for ideas for my day job) I want to try out a usability review of the site which I will then attempt to get my employers to embrace for their own products. For this I’ll be using the well proven System Usability Scale (SUS) that is made up of 10 very simple questions which can provide a great measure of usability for a website (or app) that can easily be bench-marked against any other sites (or apps). The survey should take less than 2 minutes to complete and is just 10, simple, multiple choice questions. A huge thank you to those of you that do take the time to fill it in.

Take the survey by clicking here! – Survey finished. Thanks for your feedback.

In a few weeks time I’ll post the results and show how it compares to other sites. I might run a similar survey for your views on the Strava site, you’d hope they would score a fair bit better than VeloViewer!

There will be a number of changes to VeloViewer as I swap over to the new Strava API’s during which I will attempt to improve the usability where I can, especially around the update page. I’ll post a blog entry soon as to what those changes are likely to be (for better and worse) when I get chance. Once the next version is live and in use I’ll run another of these surveys to see if the perceived usability has improved.

Strava API Troubles

Api ProblemsAs a number of you may have noticed, since the site going down last week there has been a significant increase in the number of errors encountered around the site, in particularly on the update page. For some reason, since the site going down, the veloviewer.com server no longer has access to Strava’s API. This could be because either my hosting company has blocked those requests from being made or Strava has blocked requests from that server. At present I’m not sure which.

Strava are currently looking into it from their end but weren’t specifically aware of calls from my server being blocked. I’m more inclined to point the finger at my hosting company but they seem less than willing to investigate the problem. Once confirmed that the restriction isn’t at the Strava end then I’ll press much harder for my hosting company to diagnose and resolve the issue.

I’ve got a work-around by using one of my other websites to act as a go between for the Strava API requests but it seems a little less reliable than the original requests from the veloviewer.com server. Maybe because its a Windows server rather than Linux (I have no idea really)?

What this seems to be resulting in is a number of you getting a lot more errors popping up, especially on the update screen. All the people who have been in touch had been using IE and switching over to Google Chrome has sorted the issue out. Chrome is much faster at running the JavaScript that the update process heavily uses which might be the reason why it performs more reliably. Also, you could just been hitting the server when lots of other people are so maybe give it an hour or so and try again. VeloViewer is getting remarkably popular which is stretching it’s capacity somewhat!

So, if you’re getting lots of errors then try switching to Google Chrome and see if that helps. If not then post a comment (or send me an email) including your Strava id.

I’ll make sure the new, V3 update process is more resilient to errors from the Strava API. Until then, sorry for any inconvenience.

VéloBici Spring Classics Challenge 2013

VeloBici Spring ClassicsFor the next 50 days I’ve teamed up with VéloBici to provide a leaderboard for their Spring Classics Challenge – ride the distance of as many of the Spring Classics as you can to get a chance to win some great UK designed and manufactured prizes. The more of the 7 classics you complete the better the prizes on offer become. This challenge is open to anyone around the world so sign yourself up and get riding.

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The Climbs of Stage 2 of the 2014 Tour de France – Part 2

Tour de France 2014 Stage 2 Route Map Second HalfIn a previous post I covered the climbs of the first half of stage 2 of the 2014 Tour de France on its way from York to Sheffield (also available is the climbs of stage 1). This post will cover the remaining climbs of the stage that could well be providing a safe pairs of shoulders for both the Yellow and Polka Dot Jerseys for a good number of days. Holme Moss is certainly the biggest climb of the day but the many small and steep climbs (and slippery, twisty descents) on the run-in to Sheffield are more likely to cause the upsets and there is a real sting in the tail with up to a 33% gradient on Jenkin Road just a few km from the line. Tom Boonen and Matt Goss both crashed fairly badly in this area during the 2006 Tour of Britain but hopefully those won’t be the kind of headlines of the day.

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