Local-To-You Filtering, Searching for Climbs and Rides by Location, Publishing Segments, .tcx File Importing, Competitions Leaderboard, Ride Tagging, and More—Release Notes: Sprint 9

Join in the member discussions on the Strava group: http://groups.google.com/group/strava

If you are the ‘owner’ of unnamed climbs that you want to keep– see the important note at the end of this post.

Lots to cover here and we are trying to keep these short and sweet. If you have any questions about the new functionality we pushed live on Friday 10-9-09, please get in touch: support@strava.com

LOCAL-TO-YOU FILTERING

Based on lots of feedback from members, latest rides list and popular climbs list on the Team page can now be toggled between ‘local’ (shows only results within 100 mile radius of the city/town center associated with your zip code) and ‘global’ (shows results across all of Strava). BTW–this is rev 1 of giving you tools and greater ability to localize information you see by geography and other attributes. More in a future release.

SEARCHING FOR RIDES AND CLIMBS BY ZIP CODE, LOCATION OR CATEGORY

We have added specialized search for rides and climbs (not athletes) based on zip code, city/state, and climb category. Here are examples of how you do it—all in the search field in the left side of the header:

• Zip code example: enter “03755” to search for rides in zip code 03755. Or “03755<X” for rides within X miles of zip code 03755.
• City/State example: enter “SF, CA” or “San Francisco, CA” to search for rides/climbs in SF. Yes, you can also add “<X”, for example, to return matches within X miles of the city.
• Category: here you can use the operators = (equal to), < (easier than), > (harder than), <= (easier or equal to) and >= (harder or equal to). So, for example, enter “cat>3” to find all climbs with category harder than cat-3 (so, cat-2, cat-1 and HC) or “cat<=2” for all climbs with category easier than or equal to cat-2 or “cat=HC” for all HC climbs.
• Combinations of location and climb category: here are some examples “SF, CA<20 cat>=2” finds climbs within 20 miles of San Francisco, CA that are cat2 or harder. “03755<100 cat=HC” finds all HC climbs within 100 miles of the center of zip code 03755 (Hanover, NH).

This is just rev1 of local search. We’ll be adding a better user interface in the near future.

SEGMENTS—YOU CAN NOW IDENTIFY AND EVEN PUBLISH YOUR OWN

NOTE! This description of some new functionality for Strava Segments will be kept very brief. Look for a blog post expounding on using Strava Segments in the next few days. For the background on Strava Segments, see the Sprint 6 release notes.

A Strava Segment is any part of a ride or even an entire ride that you want to define. (Climbs are segments that Strava identifies automatically for you and you have always been able to see climb results on the climb detail page.) If you have any Strava Segments in a ride, you can show them on the ride detail page in the ‘RIDESEGMENTS’ area.

Clicking on a ride segment takes you to the segment detail page. With Sprint 9, you can now identify any stretch of a ride as a Strava Segment. This is handy for climbs that are not long enough or steep enough to be categorized or for any stretch of road/trail you travel frequently. To mark a segment, just hit your lap button on your GPS device at the start and stop of the segment when you are riding. It will then show in the ‘RIDELAPS’ section of the ride detail page. Clicking on any lap of a ride shows the Strava Segment you covered in that lap.

If you keep your segment private, you will see your own results over that segment. If you name and ‘publish’ a Strava Segment, then you will see results across all riders who have ridden it and all their efforts on that segment, much like you do for categorized climbs. (Note, publishing a segment kicks of a process on our database that takes a few minutes to complete to find all previous efforts over the segment you just published.) Public segments are displayed on the ride detail page in the ‘RIDESEGMENTS’ section. The laps and best efforts sections of the ride detail page shows links to the ride segment detail page.

Please only publish segments that you think are unique and first look to see if your ride is already showing a public segment close to the one you are thinking of publishing. We’ll introduce sophisticated tools in the future to check if a segment you’re about to publish is similar to an existing segment. We’ll also introduce additional ways to publish, e.g. just for yourself vs. the world. Currently everything you publish is matched against all past and future rides.

.TCX FILE IMPORTING

Many of you have large quantities of GPS ride data stored on other sites (e.g. MB/Garmin Connect, Training Peaks) or on your computer hard drive. On the Upload screen you will now see a link “Add your Garmin Files” which takes you to a Strava utility to import .tcx files straight from your computer, bypassing Garmin Communicator. Your .tcx files have to have been captured by a device compatible with Strava (currently Garmin Edge 305/705 but very soon, Garmin Forerunner 405 as well) and still need to be well formatted.

The uploader utility works great for ride files of small-to-medium size, even with several rides. Large files (greater than 25MB) and files that have more than ‘a few’ rides in them (from Training Peaks or Ascent, for example) cannot be uploaded using this self-serve utility. If you attempt to upload a file with incorrect formatting and/or that is too big and you receive an error message, email the file to support@strava.com and we will take care of uploading to your Strava account.

COMPETITIONS LEADERBOARD

We like competitions that are fun and motivate us to get out on our bikes. We have done monthly competitions at Strava since the earliest days of our beta launch. Now you will find a new leaderboard for the current Strava competition on our Leaderboard page. This month’s competition is focused on using your bike for commuting. Checkout the new competitions leaderboard at http://strava.com/leaderboard/ and learn more about Strava’s October competition from our recent blog post.

TAGGING RIDES

On the ride detail page you can now add free-text tags for a ride. For example, you can add the tag “recovery ride” to a ride that was intentionally done at an easy pace or “Wednesday ride” to rides you do with your Wednesday ride buddies. In the near future, we will update our search functionality to allow you to search based on ride tags.

MORE…

In no particular order we have also added the following functionality:

• Watts captured by a power meter are reported with “PM” to differentiate them from watts calculated by Strava.
• the KOM Ranking (climb detail and segment detail pages) now displays the ‘rider ranking’: a rider’s name only appears at most once on the list with the rider’s best effort on the climb or segment
• ‘Vanity’ url is now sticky. If you use a vanity url (go to your profile settings to create one) it now stays as the url for your athlete page instead of simply linking to the standard url composed of your athlete id number.

UNNAMED CLIMBS WILL DISAPPEAR IN ABOUT 2 WEEKS

Climbs go unnamed when the member who first rode the climb does not give the climb a name–often because the unnamed climb is a near duplicate of a named climb (an artifact of how we found climbs in rides several months ago). We are going to implement changes to the permissions around naming climbs in an upcoming release. But we have many unnamed climbs in the Strava system now that need to be either named by the ‘climb owner’ or they will be eliminated in about 2 weeks.

So, if you know your unnamed climb is already represented by an existing named climb, then don’t bother naming it. Otherwise, if you have unnamed climbs (see your athlete page—there is a section for unnamed climbs there if you have any that you own) that you want to keep on Strava, do them a favor and give them a name.  Furthermore, if you know one of your named climbs is bogus (a duplicate or simply an uninteresting feature), append “DELETE” at the front of its name and we’ll scrub it from the system when we purge unnamed climbs. We’ll send out another warning on this a few days before we purge unnamed and unwanted climbs from Strava.

StravaHQ

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