

Ask HN: Please review my site... and find a great place to hike - andrewljohnson

Dear HN,<p>Please review my site http://www.trailbehind.com. TrailBehind is a site that helps you find great places to hike. TrailBehind also lets you collaborate to build social maps of the outdoors.<p>A couple months back, I posted the site to Hacker News for a review, and I received great feedback, and this new release reflects that feedback in full.<p>So, if you have any comments or critiques (particularly if you are a hiker, backpacker, or love the outdoors), we'd really appreciate your feedback. By this summer, we hope to have created a great resource for everyone who loves the woods.<p>ALSO - if you are really into the site, email me at andrewljohnson AT trailbehind dot com, and tell me a bit about yourself. And I'll send you a TrailBehind t-shirt, which we just had delivered, while supplies last!
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sh1mmer
I found the search confusing.

When I typed in my address it gave me a list of thing sort of close to where I
live (in San Francisco).

When I typed in Point Reyes (a lovely place to hike in Marin County) I got a
bunch of trails that sounded really similar.

I think it would be interesting to let people just take the map view directly
to the place/zipcode of where they type to scan for trails and then filter
them on the map according to their preferences.

I love the idea though.

~~~
andrewljohnson
One critical thing missing from the search results is a map. I think that will
solve this problem for you. I'll add that this week as well.

For search, what we are thinking is the search will provide search results on
the home page, but zoom directly if you invoke the search from the map.

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andrewljohnson
Also, here's an abbreviated roadmap of features we are working on that are in
various stages of done-ness:

* data downloads for your GPS device

* a web crawler that aggregates trip reports and park rules/regulations to our map

* a Flickr integration

* better ways to look at our international data

* faster searches and autocompletes

* improvements to reporting and trip-planning

* RSS feeds of changes to places on the map that you can subscribe to

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profgubler
I typed in my address to see what was close. It would be great once you search
to be able to increase the distance from your address you are willing to go
hiking.

~~~
andrewljohnson
You got it. I'll let you scope your search by distance from a point. We're
working on a number of improvements to search - that's central for us at this
point.

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amjith
* Adding the total length of a trail and the difficulty level will be useful.

* More options in the Park Index will be useful. Eg: refine the list to state parks or national parks or refine it by state, then list the trails in a park.

* The map is very slow and unresponsive, I don't think you can do much to improve the map loading speed, but I know that google recently updated their google maps to load faster.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Thanks for your comments, I'll file some issues in TRAC. We'll definitely be
adding a "parks by state" page, and giving people the difficulty rating of
trails, which is actually pretty easy to derive from the timestamps on GPS
files.

Per your comment about trail distances, I do believe if you click a trail, it
shows you the trail's length in the floating widget, next to the name of the
trail. Maybe this needs to be highlighted? Also, if you click several trails,
the 'Plan' tab will total up their distances for you.

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nadim
Here are a few points:

The initial website has a "domain parker" feel to it. I think the
colours/design are off. Just my opinion though.

The loading times (especially for the map) seemed long for a production
website. The longer I use your site (the more searches I do) the more annoying
this feels.

There is good data on here for near where I live.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Yeah, it's definitely too slow right now.

We're paying $15/month to host it on a small slice, and we've been working
hard to make it work on few resources so that we can scale it up
inexpensively.

That said, I'm getting to the point where I just want to throw a dedicated
server at the problem. The site runs smoking fast on our internal Linux
server.

We also need to do more caching. We made a lot of progress on this (like if
you click a national park the data is cached and fast), but in general, map
loads need to be snappier.

One interesting thing to note is the bigger your browser window, the slower
the site.

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profgubler
Is there a way that you can close the floating widget on the map. When you are
looking for something in an area it would be nice to be able to remove it.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Good idea, I can add that.

