

Ask YC: Review my Website, Being Served from My Laptop Right Now - dev.trailbehind.com - andrewljohnson
http://dev.trailbehind.com

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mountain_man
This is awesome. Is that usgs data? Best representation of way points I've
seen yet.

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andrewljohnson
Yeah, the site includes a list of millions of USGS waypoints, along with other
data we have collected.

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hedgehog
It looks like your site might be useful for planning hikes and such except
that I can't figure out how to get it to work. I think it's probably about 50%
that I don't know how it works and 50% that the UI needs some polish, but
besides that trailbehind looks like a good idea.

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r00k
It'd be nice to hint about what you're offering before having to enter a zip.

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andrewljohnson
When does it ask for a zip code?

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lacker
In the search box when you first load the home page.

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andrewljohnson
The button says "Find Trips."

How might it be made more clear?

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jamess
By having a landing page that isn't just a giant map. You need to explain what
your site does. As it is, I suspect most of your visitors will arrive and
depart almost immediately.

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andrewljohnson
We do have a bounce rate of about 40%, which is something we're trying to
manage. I think part of that is not knowing what to do on the site, and part
of it is because the site is really slow (until tomorrow when we launch the
new version).

We're thinking about switching from a giant map home page to having the "Geo
News" (in the main menu) as our home page, once the news page is polished.

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epi0Bauqu
Why not just use geo-location to pull up a map based on where the user is
right now?

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andrewljohnson
We'll do that eventually... it's just another feature filed in our bug
tracker. It's not clear how valuable that is though, particularly on a US
level.

The first goal for personal geo-location will be to show foreign visitors a
world map.

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okeumeni
It'll be nice that you deploy it somewhere with better bandwidth at this time
it’s hard to try it.

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andrewljohnson
Yeah, right now it's running off of Django's dev server, forwarding a port on
my laptop through an SSH tunnel to my production server. So it's a little slow
:)

I'm surprised it hasn't crashed under all of this traffic actually, since
Django's dev server isn't threadsafe.

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andrewljohnson
This is roughly what we are going to launch tomorrow. The current site is at:
www.trailbehind.com

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whatusername
How about an Australian version. _plese_ ==> looks great!

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andrewljohnson
We'll be uploading some aussie data this month, if not this week.

