Great idea, kudos. Here are some random thoughts, as I'm totally part of your target audience:
• There are people/couples/friends who avidly hike on their own, on a regular basis, and then there are people who want to hike, but are novices and/or seldom get around to it. The latter group is something like 10x the size of the former. I'd encourage you to reach out to them.
• Meetup is AFAIK the only game in town when it comes to finding other hikers/groups and it totally sucks. Meetup is about 'joining' and 'persistent groups' and mailing lists and discussion boards and...a lot of crap. People just want to hook up with other hikers, easily see who they're dealing with in terms of experience and potential flakiness (big issue in my experience) and plan a trip.
• For people looking for information to use in planning their own trip, the ability to download GPS data shared by previous hikers could be great.
This is a project I've been working on in my free time for the last year. The idea stemmed from the huge amount of outdoors-related blogs that are out there, and my frustration with the fact that all of the data is unstructured and thereby unsearchable.
Went Hiking is an attempt to be a better platform to post your outdoors-related content (starting with hiking) so that it can be structured, searchable data. It's running on PostGIS and more geospatial tools and search options will be added over time.
This is great. I've found a couple of sites similar in the mountaineering/climbing sector, but not for hiking/backpacking.
As a data point for you, one of the tools I've come to love is the split map available on Hillmap.com (Not sure if Ryan is on HN, but maybe worth getting in contact.)
Yep I (Ryan from hillmap) am on here. I also follow kaiuhl's went hiking project on github and think its great that he is tackling the social aspects of outdoors sports in an open source way. I may open source hillmap at some point but the code is pretty idiomatic/functional and somewhat optimized javascript and isn't exactly documented or particularly reusable at this point. (My real job is in cancer research...I use hillmap as a place to experiment with things like client side image processing to do slope analysis).
This area (outdoor mapping) is really interesting as there are such segmented user groups. Hillmap's biggest user group is geeky backcountry skiers which generates consistent but not heavy traffic. I've thought about trying to make a comercial go of it but the cost of things like the arcgis layers means it makes more sense to be an ad-free hobby site.
Matt at caltopo has another open source project target at SAR groups and has done some great map layers from usgs and fs scans.
Join the 204 members and add to the 1626 trips already recorded.
Good job showing me that it's an active community and that people are obviously actually using the site (8 trips per user sounds impressive - makes me think "ok, people come back to this multiple times, it must be good").
I like the map graphic at the top. HOWEVER, when I click the "map" link in the header, I see... a big empty map. Huh? The graphic on the home page showed a bunch of pins, so now I'm confused. Ok, I see "draw path" so I click on that and try to draw, but the map moves. Ok, I click a point, then another and another. Now what? Ok, stop drawing. Now what? I'm stuck here. And my only escape seems to be the back button, since I don't see any nav.
I'm not asking ou to tell me what to do, merely suggesting you make it MUCH more clear how that page works..
The map has zero instructions which I agree is totally opaque. The idea is for the map to be used to plan trips with others; someone can zoom in or search for the area they want to take a trip in, trace a route over the topographic map, and then copy and paste the pushState-updated URL to their friend. Here's an example of the trip I'm taking this weekend:
I like it. I'm going backpacking tomorrow, and would love to discover new trails.
I had trouble with the signup/login process.
* After I registered, it showed the form again instead of a success message or the homepage.
* So I filled it in again, thinking I'd done something wrong. The error "already taken" that popped in under my email address could be improved "It looks like you've already created an account with that email address, do you want to reset the password?"
* The registration and password reset emails went into the spam.
* When I got my password reset (I guess I fat-fingered it twice on the first signup form) and logged in, I got a login form under the "welcome" message. I hacked the URL to get to the homepage.
Great concept though, and you're off to a great start. I'm looking forward to seeing what all you do with it.
I like the interactive map at the top but it's annoying when the pop-up bubble moves the pin offscreen. I suggest increasing the size of the header/map (w/ sliding open animation) when a pin is clicked to allow the pin and pop-up bubble to show at the same time.
I joined your site. As an avid backpacker/canoe tripper, meetup has been basically useless. It's very hard to gauge the experience and skill of people on that site. I've had a few bad experiences, such as people flaking out, not being able to walk more than a 5 miles in a day, not knowing how to pitch a tent, etc.
The feature I really want is the ability to find future hikes, know the skill and reliability of the people going, and how I can join them. I don't have any friends that backpack, and my wife hates when I go it alone. I actually don't want to spend much time on your website. The reason I'd be going there is to get away from my computer and go outside :)
Nobody wants to go to a "tool site" and use it like they would an app - because they have an app for that. People do like community, though, and would probably be fine with going to a site just to say hi to other hikers. Make like Facebook and emphasize pictures/videos, and a forum component, and that'd be a pretty handy site.
(Feature request: make a climbing section and stuff for niches like crack climbing or slacklining!)
Why do you think Blizzard and Facebook both allow you to log in using multiple variations of CaSe of your password? Why do you think Rackspace can look up your password in plaintext for you?
When the real world and information security research collide, many of the largest and most Internet user savvy companies take the pragmatic approach that usability wins.
An surprising percentage of new signups forget their latest new password between their signup and their first return to the site. Letting them look up that password in the email they just received helps these new users get back into the site.
This site is hiking info, not a secret stash of gold bullion. I think the approach they described in answer to you here is a reasonable one for this kind of site.
Your password is not stored in clear text. It's salted and SHA-256 hashed.
Your password email was generated during the initial save to the database. It was not logged and is now gone from the server. Besides, this is hardly national security—this is hiking.
• There are people/couples/friends who avidly hike on their own, on a regular basis, and then there are people who want to hike, but are novices and/or seldom get around to it. The latter group is something like 10x the size of the former. I'd encourage you to reach out to them.
• Meetup is AFAIK the only game in town when it comes to finding other hikers/groups and it totally sucks. Meetup is about 'joining' and 'persistent groups' and mailing lists and discussion boards and...a lot of crap. People just want to hook up with other hikers, easily see who they're dealing with in terms of experience and potential flakiness (big issue in my experience) and plan a trip.
• For people looking for information to use in planning their own trip, the ability to download GPS data shared by previous hikers could be great.
Best of luck!