New on Strava today – Segment Publishing, New Look, Event Improvements
Strava pushed some new features to the site today. Here’s the run-down and links to FAQ pages where you can learn more.
Segments- compare and compete like you do on climbs
You probably already know that Strava automatically detects the climbs you do. Once a climb is identified, you can compare your time on the climb to anyone’s effort on the same climb. Strava Segments work just like that for stretches of road or trail that are not climbs. Click on the Publish Segment link under the nav bar on any ride page to use Strava’s Segment creation wizard which will guide you through the process to create, name, and publish the segment to Strava. We compare all efforts by anyone over the segment, just like we do for climbs, and show you results on a page devoted to that segment. See the FAQ topic on this for information on how to create and publish your own segments on Strava.
Strava Events- Improvements
A few weeks ago we released Strava Events, bringing a whole new level of “compare and compete” to your riding. We got some great feedback and redesigned things a bit for today’s release. We have added an Event landing page for participants to get basic information about an event. You can now create events that have routes as well as stages within the route that are the basis for event rankings. We also added improvements to the process for creating new events on Strava and the ability to manually enter ride data for an event. Click here to go to Strava Events. You can also get a quick “how to” on Events by visiting our Events FAQ on support.strava.com.
Strava’s New Look
Strava has a new header and new logged-out pages. We redesigned our landing page, tour page, and plans & pricing page to be more informative. Log out of Strava and have a look. And, definitely take the ‘Tour‘ — you might learn about some features you didn’t know existed on Strava. Then tell us what you think about what you see on Twitter.
Some minor fixes: time zones, reporting min/mile for runs, more informative posts to Twitter and Facebook of your activities.
Enjoy!
Strava upload times: some performance stats
On February 17, 2010 Strava moved to a new hosted environment (EngineYard) and cloud data storage (Amazon S3). As many of our users noticed, it took us several days to get things tuned properly for performance. Where this was most noticeable was on uploads. We saw upload times spike into several minutes, often throwing errors where files didn’t upload at all. Over the course of the following week our dev team worked hard to improve performance. As is typical in these situations, each solution implemented revealed the next layer of the problem. But, after nearly 10 days of searching for the small fixes that add up to big improvements, Strava’s dev team had gotten site performance and upload times in particular to a great place. You can see for yourself in this chart showing the daily average upload times (in seconds) from Feb 8 – Mar 9, 2010.
average upload time (seconds) Feb 8 - Mar 9, 2010
Introducing Strava Events
We just released STRAVA Events. You create them, invite your friends, and have a little competitive fun.
Strava Events is a new feature we released today which brings a whole new level of “compare and compete” to your riding. Click here to go to Strava Events and follow along as you read these release notes. You can also get a quick “how to” on Events by visiting our Events FAQ on support.strava.com.
Strava Events- The Release Notes
Creating an Strava Event is easy and anyone on Strava can do it. First you define what Stages will be ridden in the event and when they should be ridden (single day or multiple days). Then you invite your friends on Strava to join the event. You can also make the event public allowing anyone on Strava to join. A Stage is simply a Segment within Strava, e.g. a climb or sprint that is already defined in Strava. You can also provide event details like date, location, a description and even upload a photo.
What happens next is the cool part: when you use Strava Events, your GPS device turns into a “virtual” timing chip on event day. Strava recognizes when riders registered for the event have ridden the event’s segments on the specified day or days and automatically captures the results on the event’s page. Overall results are shown on the event’s Results tab. The “winner” of the event is the rider with the fastest cumulative time across all the stages (if you ride a stage multiple times we’ll count your best time).
Some additional highlights on Strava Events:
- We let you be creative in how you define the Stages; Each Stage can span any number of days or there can be multiple stages that take place on a single day of the event.
- We’ll be adding other features to Strava Events in the near future. We’re just getting started.
- Results are shown by gender for individual stages as well as for the overall event.
- You can see all events currently in Strava on the main Events page. The default view is to show all events but you can toggle to show events near your location.
- Users can join events they plan on participating in, or watch events they are interested in.
- When you ride an event’s stages, your results are posted both on your athlete home page as usual but also to the event page of any the event you are registered to. You don’t have to take an extra step to have a ride count for an event.
- Each event has a News tab allowing the event administrator to broadcast news and announcements about the event.
- If an event participant has not completed all the stages, their results will show up in the Partial tab.
Have fun trying out events! And let us know what you think of Strava Events on Twitter @stravaHQ.
By the way, you may have noticed our ride upload times improving significantly over the past few weeks. Our move to a new hosted environment and a server cloud in late February had its share of the usual hiccups. This resulted in some pretty attrocious performance until we sorted things out. You can see more info on our historical upload times here.
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