E ver since I added the elevation graphs to the site, to support the route maps, I was never really 100% happy with them. They certainly served their purpose, showing the lay of the land for each week/day’s route, but, well, they could have been better.
That was all well and good but what I really wanted was to marry up the two parts of the day’s route: the map of where I went and how the landscape looked (or more importantly in some cases, how it felt) along the route. That’s all changed now!
I’ve spent some time re-doing the maps/elevation charts so that the two now interact with each other so that you can see how the land lies at any point in the week or day’s route. An example can be seen below, which shows the route for week one of my walk:
If you hover over a point in the route, the chart below will show you the elevation at that point. If you highlight a point on the chart, the map will show you where that point is on the map. Brilliant!
While I was doing that I used GPS Visualizer to add elevation information to my original GPX route files, with the new files being used to get the maps/charts working together. This certainly saved a lot of work as it did it all automagically for me. Nice!
Having done this with all of the route files from the walk, the updated elevation information showed that I’d actually walked up/down 4.58 times the height of Mount Everest and not the 3 times I originally thought. That’s mental! I’ve updated the Statistics Page to show the updated climb/descent information from this latest round of number crunching.
Other minor things that have changed during this spring clean:
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Much like the updated altitude charts, the various charts on the Statistics Page have been updated to be more interactive. If you hover over a point in the chart it’ll show you the value of that point.
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The preparation blog posts that didn’t have featured images now have them. These have mostly been taken from free stock image sites, choosing an image that kind of worked with the blog post.
No more empty posts with just text in the blog archive pages! -
I’ve removed the reading time from the top of each blog post and replaced this functionality with a progress bar across the top of the page. As you read down the pages/posts you’ll see how far through you are; much better than an arbitrary number of how long it reckoned it would take to read.
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Blog post navigation has been updated. When you reach the end of a blog post you’ll now get next and previous post boxes slide in from the side of the page. This has a link to the post as well as showing the featured image and an excerpt from the post so you get a heads up on what it’s about.
I think that’s everything, other than a small battle I had with a bot that tried to fill the site with spam links. It took a while for me to figure out how it was getting round all the security measures I had in place – including new ones as I had my daily fight – but in the end I won! Hurrah!
If you run a website, one thing I cannot stress enough is having a good backup strategy and system in place. If it wasn’t for the fact that I had a daily backup of the site (files and database) I would have had a hell of a lot of work cleaning up the injected rubbish the bot added. You have been warned!
Not a completely fresh lick of paint but it’s definitely made the information easier to visualise.
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