I am just finishing testing a ride analysis page that lets you analyze and compare rides (or sections of rides), and play them back so you can race yourself and see all the stats to help you determine why you are (or are not) improving. That’ll be released in the next day or two, then I will be making marked improvements to the workout calendar. I expect to be releasing those changes within a week or two, and those updates will solve your problem with not being able to record activities without routes.

Thanks for writing us up! If you have any suggestions for us just get in touch.

Btw, I also am on a bit of a budget so I never picked up a GPS but I hear you can get a USB GPS for like $40. I was planning on sticking one in my laptop for a make shift GPS. I don’t know if you already have a laptop that is small enough like the ASUS EEE but if you do, I thought you might like the idea.

The interactive google map embed only works for someone who runs a site or blog (security issues for most places like forums prevent it being used), but is super simple to use. To the right of any trip or route map, there should be a youtube style text box containing a bit of HTML, which is labeled “Embed URL”. Just copy and paste this into your blog post and you are set!

The embed will get prettied up here soon as part of our new design that is in the works. Might even investigate some personal styling of the embed if I really decide to go crazy

I am glad you are enjoying the site, since we have been putting in a considerable amount of hours to get things to where they are now. Additionally, there is a whole pile of new things being worked on that should be ready for release within the next month.

The import feature was a random thought I had one day. It’s hard to get people to invest time in a new service if they are already mostly satisfied with another. That is if a user created 50 routes with a competitor, they don’t want to redraw them all with us. As a result, I wanted to make that process as simple as possible. We know we are currently as good, if not better than the main competition in several ways, we now only need to round out the edges, add the premium services and improve our user interface. Another problem is content: people don’t want to use something if there is no content! Total chicken and the egg, but the import feature allows people to generate content on ridewithgps, thus making us more desirable for the casual user that runs across us. Long story short, the import feature will be expanded here soon, with a much improved UI and support for a couple of the other sites out there. Also, I want to investigate bulk uploading of TCX, GPX and KML files for those who just have folders filled with them on their computer

As to your suggestion for inputting an activity without mapping it: both Zack and I have had the same thought, and are playing around with the best way to manage activities not connected to maps. Additionally, we are working on good ways to group types of activity. This way you can get a summary of miles, elevation, calories etc for multiple separate activity types. If you have any thoughts on the subject, we would love to hear them.

The direction mode hiccups are, unfortunately, common place. Google obviously can’t have a perfect dataset for the whole united states. For example, if a road is two lane, sometimes you’ll click on the returning lane, and the route will take the next exit and double back to where you clicked. There is no real decent way to avoid this, which is why you can ‘draw lines’ to compensate! Additionally, bike paths aren’t in their database, requiring the tedious clicking short segments to draw. However, I have a feature in the works that should make it a one-time action and thus much more efficient

And in regards to mapmyride…unfortunately the ads do not disappear when you hand them $5 a month! I about fell over when I shelled out the cash and still had the clutter. I personally can’t stand busy sites (my ADD doesn’t allow it), which is why we are striving to keep our site clutter free. If ads do come, we will make sure they benefit everyone (users, advertisers as well as us, the provider) rather than annoy most.

All in all, thanks for the positive review. We are happy to work with community members in order to develop a comprehensive and intuitive feature set. Feel free to drop us a line!

Cullen King