Fixed Issues with Uploading Rides

We had a few bugs with ride uploads that we fixed today:

All Garmin Edge 500 rides appear every time you upload

We fixed a bug where we were showing all Garmin 500 rides on your device as new, even if they had been uploaded before. This affected riders in timezones other than PDT.

Unable to re-upload a ride that’s been deleted

If for some reason you delete a ride, you can now re-upload that ride from a Garmin device or file.

Upload appears to stall on IE7

The javascript we were using for our ride upload progress bar wasn’t working properly in IE7. Even though the rides were getting uploaded and processed, it appeared that they were hanging up. The progress bars should work fine now for IE7.

Garmin Edge 305 is displayed as a 205 on ride page

This has now been fixed, and your 305 should be shown as such on your ride pages.

Please contact us at support.strava.com if you are still having any issues uploading your rides.

Cycling Trip to Oregon

I recently returned from Oregon to visit family, and I had the pleasure of meeting lots of enthusiastic riders in the Portland area. I’d like to give a quick shout out to those of you and your teammates and friends who’ve jumped aboard… I look forward to keeping up with you on the site!

Here’s a quick excerpt that captures some of our trip:

Cycling is part religion in Portland, Oregon. I’ve never once considered living in a big city, but if some unimaginable force were to drop me into a metropolis forever, I’d choose Portland. If you’ve never been there, but you equate the value of each individual day to how much time you spend on your bike, you’ll immediately feel at home in the aptly-named City of Roses.

My brother and sister live in Portland; both ride bikes. One is a mad commuter who refuses to use anything but flat pedals (not even toe-clips), the other is a huge fan of dirt and refuses to give up her bomber (but heavier) touring bike, no matter how smooth the road. It’s also ironic that she once lived on one of the only dirt roads within city limits.

Despite our constant controversies over what and how to ride, it’s always a pleasure to bike with them and they’ve taken me to some cool spots over the years. They know I love to climb, so Larch Mountain is always a favorite. And when we can’t escape the city, they send me into the West Hills to get my kicks. I love the combination of the views of Mt. Hood and the enormous city below from these vantage points.

During this trip, my sister, my boyfriend Matt, and I headed to the Trout Lake region in Washington for the Oregon State Road Championships (Oregon championships held in Washington? hmmm, what’s the catch?). Washington or not, the state title was definitely alluring to many and captured a strong group of riders. This is where I came to appreciate the Sorella Forte Women’s Team. They had a large number of participants who controlled much of the race, including Anne Linton and Sarah Tisdale, who are new members to Strava (welcome!). Apparently their Portland Club is HUGE and is made up solely of women. Very cool! After the race, I also caught up with Steve Schwaeber, a Veloce rider out of Portland. Steve and his teammates will also be test driving Strava. I have to say thanks again to Steve for giving me some recovery food, since I was locked out of our car after the race (a result of poor communication between my sister and I… ahhhh, family relations). Matt and Sue had returned late from a ride that took them through the ranches and forests at the base of Mt. Adams. They came back with stories about great climbs, mountain views, loose cattle, cheese pizza, and fist-sized gravel. If nothing else, it proved there is plenty of challenging and scenic riding to be had a short drive from Portland’s city limits.

In my past two visits, I’ve also made sure to head over to the Portland International Raceway (not so “international,” but there are lots of cool flags to help gauge the wind) on Monday nights to race the track series. It’s always a thrill to bike race when you don’t know any of your other competitors. Plus, the track here has an amazing turnout and is super safe and friendly. That night, my sister also raced with the Novice women and Matt jumped into his first race ever (on a rental bike no less — see Waterfront Bikes for some great rental options). No primes that night but Strava was able to donate 2 Garmin units with Strava memberships to the organizers at Team Oregon. They’ll be this month’s 1^st place prizes for the men and women (a nice incentive to go fast!).

In speaking with Team Oregon at registration, I met Emiliano (try not to butcher the name) and his girlfriend, Lana (Team… hmmm, can’t quite remember, but she has a very sharp looking pink kit).  I’ve come to learn that both Emiliano and Lana, in addition to having exotic names, are very dedicated athletes and they’ve already shared some great ideas regarding Strava.

Later that week and after feeling relatively good at the track, I was still debating racing with the Men’s 3 at the Twilight Crit in downtown Portland. Finally, I decided against it (thanks to Matt who all too often helps me with my indecisive “Libra-ness”) and was quite thankful for that once I saw the course in person. It was a recipe for disaster, tight and numerous corners with precariously located manholes, ready to eat you, yikes! I was much happier remaining upright with the sole responsibility of balancing my beer.

The pièce de résistance for the trip had to be watching and waiting for my sister’s bike team to get to the finish of the Rapha Gentlemen’s Race. This well-known and epic event changes course every year, and this year it caught everyone a bit off guard. 123 miles including some dirt and mega-sized gravel was not a good mixture with the surprising 90+ temperatures. While eavesdropping among the teams who had succeeded in finishing (less than half), similar themes emerged, as the words “flat, puncture, heatstroke, dehydration, cramping, delirious” and other four letter counterparts were all too common. Poor Sue, I thought to myself, “will she/they make it?” Finally at around 7:30 they rounded the corner into the Chris King parking lot, looking many shades darker than when they began. Their stylish kits were now a dull and monotone dirt brown. “What took you so long!” I began to joke. Little did I know there had been a significant handicap to overcome. Suzanne had broken her pedal in the first 20 miles of the race and her front derailleur busted shortly after. Turns out she rode the whole thing with one pedal and no big ring. Way to go sis, STUBBORN and tough as nails! I couldn’t be more proud.

Signing out with a big welcome to the new Portland riders, including my sister, Sue from Velodirt. I hope to see many of you during my next visit. Enjoy Strava and keep us updated on your amazing cross season!

Here are some helpful links for any riders who are considering a trip to Oregon in the future:

• www.waterfrontbikes.com for rentals.
• http://velodirt.com for more info on riding the dirt.
• http://obra.org for racing info and events.
• http://oregon.cyclingaction.com/ for Oregon cycling highlights and news.
• http://www.racemondaynight.com/blog/ a Monday night series at the Portland International Raceway.
• http://www.hopworksbeer.com/ for the best combo of bikes and beers.
• http://gritandglimmer.com/2010-rapha-gentlemans-race-report-in-full/ a very entertaining summary of the Rapha race.
• http://www.soapboxracer.com/index.htm for just plain fun… on wheels.

Bug Fixes, Tweaks and New Features

Since we released the latest version of Strava on Monday, we’ve received a lot of great feedback from Strava members. As we mentioned in our blog post, we’re continuing to build on the new design and hope to release improvements on a regular basis.

Today, we’ve updated Strava with a bunch of bug fixes, tweaks and other improvements — many of which were suggested by members, thanks!

Here’s a quick highlight of the important changes:

• Added KOMs link to athlete profile page
• Added ability to edit multiple activities at once from Activities page
• Fixed some display issues with IE7
• Added link to create new club to Clubs section
• Enabled searching for climbs without entering a location
• Made the elevation map segments clickable

The ability to edit multiple activities at once was something we were improving upon, but didn’t finish prior to the Monday release. It’s an important part of the work flow for uploading new rides, so we wanted to get it out as quickly as possible. Here are some screens that show it in action:

New activities are displayed in edit mode by default.

You can also edit existing rides from the activities view by hovering over the ride and clicking the edit button.

If you live or work in San Francisco, don’t forget to come by, meet the Strava team, and let us know what you think of the recent improvements at our meetup tonight!

Strava Meetup

We’re having an informal Strava meetup this Thursday, August 19th, in San Francisco. We’ll be at Rosamunde in the Mission starting at 5pm until ?

San Francisco-based Strava members and cycling enthusiasts are invited to come by and give us your thoughts on the new updates, as well as any other feedback, complaints or suggestions you have.

So if you’re in SF on Thursday, make sure you come by and say hello, and we’ll buy you a beer!

Updated User Interface and Features

Today we released some big updates to Strava that we’ve been working on for a while now. Primarily, we have been concentrating on improving the overall user experience — this has meant a reworking of the Strava navigation, a refresh of the visual interface and rethinking some of the more complex screens and workflows. The impetus for all of this work has come from a variety of sources, mainly from the feedback we’ve received over the past 3-4 months from the Strava community. We appreciate the feedback you’ve given us in the customer surveys and support forums — please continue to let us know how we’re doing!

The good news: this release makes some dramatic improvements to the overall look and feel of Strava, as well as to a couple of the most important functions.

Rides

The ride detail page has been completely redesigned — the map is bigger, the graphs are richer and provide much more useful information and functionality (including climb highlighting, zooming, overlays for elevation, power, heart rate and cadence), and segment efforts are now included on the page, so you no longer have to pogo-stick between your ride page and your segment efforts. We’ve also stubbed in the basics for ride report functionality. The ride pages are hands-down the most complex on Strava and we’re not done improving them. But this release is a big step towards making them easier to use while retaining all the interesting data that Strava is know for providing.

Ride Detail Screen

Ride Performance Graph

Ride Segment Comparison

Uploading Activities

Uploading has been a pain point for many of us since day one. We are constantly working on improving the upload process and providing support to customers when all else fails. In this release, we’ve also redesigned the upload flow to make it faster and not hold you “hostage” to the process. We’ve decoupled the uploading of the files from your Garmin device (which relies on Garmin’s Communicator plugin, something we have little control over) from the data processing we do on Strava. This means that you no longer have to wait for everything to finish before you can browse your Strava account. Once your files are uploaded, you are taken to the Activities screen where loading bars give you feedback on your ride processing — but you can also leave the Activities screen and check out other rides and activities on Strava if you happen to be uploading a lot of data.

Upload Screen

Upload Processing

Dashboard, Profile and Activities

With this update, we’ve started reworking the old home page, breaking apart the concepts of a Dashboard, a Profile page and an Activities page. Your Dashboard will now be your default landing page — the place where you can view timely and important information and updates about your activities and your friends’ activities on Strava — and it is only visible to you. Your Profile page will become more and more your “face” to the Strava community, where your friends can see your recent activity and any other information you choose to show. Your Activities page is your location for all your activities, with an improved basic and advanced search that lets you filter your activities by several criteria. We have plans to continue improving and adding to these three pages, but we feel that this is a big step in the right direction.

Dashboard

Athlete Profile

Activities Page

Avatars for Everything

Many Strava members have asked to be able to upload more photos and images to Strava. Although you have been able to add a user photo, bike photos and other images for a while now, it hasn’t been obvious how to do so, nor have we displayed those images in a way that makes sense. As of today, we’ve implemented default avatars for members, bikes, clubs and events, on top of letting you upload your own images for any of these. We’ve also started using the Gravatar service — so those of you that have a Gravatar account will see your Gravatar image shown on Strava. If you use Gravatar, but want to upload a different photo for Strava, you can do so and it will override your Gravatar image.

It’s taken us some time and a lot of effort to get to this point, but we’re excited about direction Strava is headed. Let us know what you think about the updates in the comments below. If you encounter any issues, please contact us at support.strava.com. For those of you in San Francisco, we’re putting together an informal meetup for this week, where you can drop by and let us know what you like and don’t like about the changes, as well as talk to us about features you’d like to see in the future. Check back here for more information on when and where that will be taking place.