Upload Tricks and Tips

Hello from Hanover, NH, home of Strava East. As the rain pours steadily down amid temps in the 40′s I’m feeling like today is not a great day for a ride. Instead, I feel like sharing some tricks and tips for making your Strava uploads fast and trouble-free. In no particular order…

1. Turn your GPS device on 5 minutes before your ride. This allows the device to lock in on the best satellites and accurately determine a starting elevation. (Okay– has nothing to do with uploads to Strava but it’s a good tip nonetheless)
2. You can upload multiple rides at a time to Strava. We’ll grab the 10 latest rides but if you have more rides to upload just repeat the upload process.
3. Strava will not waste your time uploading rides stored on your device that have already been uploaded. You will not see them on the list of rides ready for upload
4. Delete old rides from your device. This speeds the upload process because no time is wasted on determining not to upload rides you have already uploaded. (See #3 above.)
5. When you are uploading a set of rides and you see a ride or two (or three…) that you do not want to upload, you can avoid uploading them by clicking on the “skip” button next to these rides. For now, if you accidentally “skip” a ride you later want to upload there is no going back… on your own that is. Just email us at support@strava.com and we can get your ride back on the upload screen. In the future, we plan to give you the ability to “unskip” rides that you have previously skipped.

That’s enough for now. If you have any additional tricks and tips you want to contribute, just add them in the comments to this post. We always love to hear from you.

Feedin’ the addiction…

Michael Horvath – Chief Trickster

Strava Release Notes – Sprint 2

In case you’re wondering if we count by 2′s at Strava… we don’t. It’s true that the first new feature release was sprint 0 on May 6. And here are release notes on sprint 2. But, there was a “sprint 1″. We just didn’t blog about it because all of the changes were internal to Strava and you probably would not have noticed a difference (unless you are clocking our server response times, for example). We’ll continue to blog about the stuff that really matters and keep quiet about all of the good stuff we’re doing to make things hum. On that note, here are the major enhancements you should now be seeing at Strava:

1. Comment on ride and climb detail pages—comment on your own rides and climbs or on someone else’s! You can see comments people have posted about your rides and climbs on your home page. You have control to delete comments posted by anyone on your own rides and climbs.
2. Email a ride detail page url—you can now email the url for a ride detail page to anyone, even non-members, and they can see the ride detail page without needing to log in.
3. New home page and login—We have created a cleaner page at www.strava.com consistent with the pages after login. Non-members can now register to be invited when we launch by clicking on “register here” at the top so please tell all your cycling friends (and foes).
4. Report empty rides to user during upload (instead of ignoring them)—this avoids junk uploads that caused problems in the past. Rides with no data are created if you start and stop the device without moving sufficient distance and if you exceed the memory of the device and start writing over old rides making them empty but still present in the directory of the device.

Thanks for all of the feedback and suggestions. We love to hear from you at support@strava.com.

Team Strava

Strava Release Notes — Sprint Zero

As promised we are working on frequent updates and releases — typically every 1-2 weeks. To that end, our first significant update (internally known as “Sprint Zero”), was released this morning. We spent a majority of time working on basic formatting and bugs. But we also accomplished three major tasks:

1. A new Climb Detail Page — When you click on a climb from any given ride (and/or from the Leaderboard listing for Top Climbs), you will now be directed to a page that highlights both the climb details and the relevant performances on that climb. This allows a rider to compare multiple rides up the same climb, as well as review the performances of other riders. You can still access the original Climb Profile pages by searching for a specific climb.
2. Search Changes — We now deliver searches with pagination. When a rider types in a query, the default result will be in Rides. By clicking on either Climbs or Athletes, you can then see the results in that category.
3. Internal Tools — We developed a number of back-end tools that allow our development team to better manage and edit the data. We are now notified in real-time when errors occur on the site and we have better tools in place to diagnose upload issues. We can also reprocess, edit or delete rides at a member’s request.

As always, your feedback is critical. All of your comments and ideas are being logged into our system. While many of the ideas have not yet been implemented, they are all being reviewed and prioritized. So keep the comments coming!

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact our Member Support team. They can be reached at support@strava.com.

Feedin’ the addiction…

Strava Jobs Page

At Strava, we love the startup process.  We love the chaos and the competition.  Bottom-line: we love being in the game, not on the sidelines.

Now we are looking for a few more folks who love the same… and we have created a Jobs page on our blog to let you know about it. There are currently two openings in our Palo Alto, CA office. Have a look and if think you or someone you know Strava is a good match, please contact info@strava.com and let’s talk.