Rearranged pages, better views into your climbs & rides, 'vanity' urls, and more… Sprint 8 release notes

When was the last time you rearranged the furniture in your bedroom? Makes everything seem new and fresh, doesn’t it. Well, we pushed new code on Thursday (09.17.2009) and you will see that we have rearranged a few pages on Strava, among many other things. Most of these modifications and additions are in direct response to the great feedback we keep getting from YOU, so thank you for pushing Strava forward. These notes should help guide you as to what is new, but nothing beats poking around on Strava and finding all the ‘new’ yourself.

Team page and Leaderboard page

We have added a new page called ‘Leaderboard’ which shows the 7day rolling leaderboards for the six standing competitions you are used to seeing on the Team page. The old Team page has gotten a new look. It still shows shows the list of latest rides uploaded to Strava, but the list is now paginated. You can go back all the way to the first rides ever logged on Strava if you care to. You will also see a list of the newest climbs found (with a link to the complete list of new climbs), and a list of the most popular climbs (with a link to the full list of popular climbs). Coming soon… the ability to see the ride and climb lists ‘regionalized’ to your geographical area. The Strava blog feed and Strava totals are still on the team page.

Expanded climb leaderboards

When you look at a climb page, you now have many more ways to see results of your efforts and those of other riders. Under ‘MYRESULTS’, clicking on ‘see more results…’ shows you the full list of all your efforts up that climb and your PR history of best efforts. (Think of it as…when you do that climb slower than a previous PR, it does not show up on the PR history list but when you beat a previous PR, it shows up on the PR history list ahead of your previous PR.) Under ‘LATESTRIDES’, clicking on ‘see more results…’ shows a paginated list of all efforts up that climb. Finally, under ‘KINGOF THE MOUNTAIN’ , clicking on ‘see more results…’ shows a full climb leaderboard with the ranked order of all efforts, history of KOM for that climb, ranked order of riders by their best efforts, and the ranked order of all efforts on that climb for men and for women separately.

Expanded data on athlete detail page

On an athlete’s page you will now see a list of an athlete’s favorite climbs (with a link to the full list); a list of the climbs where the athlete is the KOM (with a link to the full list), and a list of all the athlete’s unnamed climbs (with a link to the full list).  Remember, if you are the first to ascend a climb then you get naming rights and can describe its start & end characteristics. The list of an athlete’s unnamed climbs will be helpful in keeping Strava’s data accurate and useful for all. We will be turning our attention to getting unnamed climbs named and described by their ‘owners’ in an upcoming Strava competition. Stay tuned for more.

‘Vanity’ urls

You can now set how you want your athlete  home page url to look on Strava.  Your athlete home page has the format strava.com/athletes/### and still does, where ‘###’ is your athlete id number in our database. But, you are not number to us and we want your url to be as unique as you are. Go to the the Edit Profile page to choose your  ‘vanity’ url. For example, you can set it to ‘bigmark and you can  athlete homepage url would then be strava.com/athletes/bigmark. You can send this url to anyone or even put it on your business cards. We do.

The little stuff

We have added a number of nice touches (if we do say so ourselves): the bar chart on the athlete page now has smart scaling of the bar heights based on weekly stats of the athlete; the bike used on a ride is now included in the Ride Details section of the ride page; the perceived effort and ‘commute’ designation are now editable on the Ride page by the ride owner; and a few minor bugs with Athlete Rides search have been fixed. Also, if you ride with a PowerTap and a Garmin Edge 705 with +ANT capturing the data coming off of it, we now report both the measured watts from your PowerTap as well as our calculated watts from your GPS data so you can compare the two. See the note below about changes to our watts calculcations.

Behind the scenes

What you will not see, but undoubtedly will appreciate through faster response times, is that we have completed a big clean-up of old tables and code making our database smaller and more efficient. We have also gone over all of our math and implemented revised calculations for elevation gain and calculated watts. In essence, a better smoothing algorithm is now being used. The net result is that you are likely to see calculated watts have increased by 2-5% for most efforts. In comparisons with measured watts from a PowerTap device, our calculated watts are within the range of measurement error of the two devices.

Please let us know what you think– either drop us a line at support@strava.com or post a comment to the Strava group.

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