We're glad to announce the release of a much requested feature for the Android App: the Search Pack, the search service for Android to explore trails in wikiloc.com right from your Android. Discover trails near your location sorted by proximity or near your next destination. The Search Pack includes filters by activity, distance, elevation, difficulty and choices like “only loop trails”. You can also search by keyword, trail ID or your favorite trails.

If you already have Wikiloc App on your Android, you must upgrade to the latest version (2.0) or get it from Google Play. Then you can get a Search Pack from wikiloc.com or directly from the App.


We initially thought to offer the Search Pack for a limited time, say 1 month, 6 months or one year renewable. After consulting with several of you, we realized that if you buy the pack for a month and then for whatever reason (period of bad weather, personal problems, etc. ..) you can’t use it during that time you would have to pay again for renewing it, even without having used it. We agreed it'd be best to offer the service without a time limit and just pay for use. You'll have free access to search trails until you've reached the limit of downloads, each pack includes 100 trail downloads.

Also, since attaching the Search Pack to a single smartphone was not convenient the Search Pack is associated with your user account at Wikiloc.com, so you can search and download trails from your smartphone or a friend phone by just signing in to your account.

You can download trails from the web and transfer them to your Android, but we hope you'll find the Search Pack convenient and decide it's worth paying a few euros for it to discover and download trails in a simpler way and helping us out a bit so we can continue to improve Wikiloc.

We know it's taken quite some time, so thanks for your patience and support.


Hope you like it!

--
Jordi

Private messaging

Private messaging, a much requested feature, is finally online. You can now contact directly another wikiloc user using the new button under his/her photo.

And we've added several outdoor activities including nordic walking, via ferrata, swimming and more!

We keep working on improvements you've been asking for, stay tuned!

Jordi

Advertising Opportunities on Wikiloc.com

Wikiloc was born in 2005. Back then, we didn´t know if it was the right time to launch something like that, if the site would be useful for the users or how it would evolve over the time. But there was something that was very clear to us: the site would be successful only if you, the community of users, were at the top of each end every decision we take at Wikiloc. Only if you felt really comfortable uploading tracks, sharing content and making comments this would be something worth keeping working at. Thus this has turned into our motto: the user goes first.

And so over the years, we have been working with the above goal in mind. Each new feature we add, each change we make or each functionality we remove from the site goes towards making Wikiloc user's life easier, while at the same time trying to add new features to give you more power to do more, to share more, to discover more.

We have gone a long way, but this is just the beginning. Though we can't yet share it with all of you, we have great plans in mind and we are extremely excited about them. Part of those plans involve making our team to grow and to take it to the next level. And for this, my friends, we need to tap into a stronger source of income. Although we have had AdSense advertising on Wikiloc, it's not as relevant as we would like, thus not as useful nor close to the motto I've stated above. We believe that advertising needs to fulfill three pillars: allow us to built a better site, give results to advertisers AND to add value to the user. Those three points are essential. It needs to be a win-win-win situation, if not, it simply won´t work.

For this, for the last few weeks we have been working on setting up our platform to open Wikiloc to new sponsors and advertisers. If you own (or work in) a business in an industry closely related to Wikiloc content, you are in sync with Wikiloc's way of doing things and want to share your products or services with hundreds of thousands of internet users, drop us a line at advertise AT wikiloc DOT com or take a look at our advertising page.

And if you are one of Wikiloc's community members, expect the same old Wikiloc with new added value and new great things ahead.

Jordi

Explore photos taken along the trails

We've improved the dynamic map page you use to explore trails by adding a photo thumbnail bar right below the map. The already more than 350.000 beautiful photos and videos we all have shared in wikiloc.com had to be more prominent.

By moving the mouse pointer above the trails list, on the icon on the map or on a photo thumbnail, you'll see that the trail is highlighted, if you click you'll navigate to that trail's page with all the details.



If you want to try it live simply open the map page and start exploring!

We hope that will help you discover interesting trails easily in the World Map before opening the detailed trail page.

We've also been working in several bug fixes and speed improvements and we've advanced in new features that soon will go live.

Hope you like it!

--Jordi

Yesterday's Outage

Yesterday, from 1:12pm until shortly before 9pm GMT, we had an unscheduled and unplanned outage due to a DNS issue at our domain registrar. That basically means that Wikiloc couldn't be reached from several European countries (see screenshot below).



I've been working like a mad man last night to make the site accessible from everywhere again, I have setup two DNS servers and several other measures that should prevent this from happening again in the future. Wikiloc.com should be back up soon for you, if it’s not already.

The site was functioning normally and of course no data has been lost. It's been just a domain name resolution issue.

My sincere apologies and thanks for your patience. If you have any questions don't hesitate to contact me.

--
Jordi

You may now choose your activities

For those of you that have contacted me telling that "I'm a hiker/cyclist and I'd like to see only hiking/bicycling trails in Wikiloc", I'm happy to announce that you may already do so.

For example, I'm currently planning a bicycle touring trip in Switzerland and now I can choose to see only bicycling trails in the area:


Additionally you can sign in and set your preferred activities by default in your settings page and from then on see only those activities in Wikiloc:


I know many of you have been awaiting for this feature, so many thanks for your patience and for your continuous feedback. Hope you enjoy it!

--Jordi

Wikiloc enters the Alexa's "top 50.000" sites!

I couldn't resist to post this one :) Wikiloc is placed 49,818 in the Alexa Traffic Rank list. That's a pretty cool number on the Internet considering there are an estimated 206,026,787 sites out there.



Back to work, I'm working on several improvements that will go live in the next few days. Stay tuned!