Wikiloc at the Change Summit in National Geographic

I'm excited to announce that we'll have the opportunity to make a presentation of Wikiloc at the Change Summit that will be held in National Geographic's headquarters in Washington DC after winning the Geotourism Challenge.

And thanks to Ashoka Changemakers we'll join the other winners, Pepy tours from Cambodia and Nature Air from Costa Rica, in a round table at the Educational Travel Conference in Rhode Island where more than 1000 nonprofit travel professionals will meet.

We hope to return from those events with many new ideas to improve Wikiloc and make it much more useful for you. If you happen to be there give me a howler, I'd be happy to meet you in DC or in Rhode Island!

--Jordi

More map layers available

You have available two new cool base maps with worldwide coverage. The first one is a relief map that albeit hasn't data at big scales (you'll have to zoom out to see the map) it is spectacular specially around mountains. It is maintained and offered by the guys at http://maps-for-free.com/ and looks like this:



The second one is also a great topographic map with beautifully detailed info (contour lines, trees depicting forests, shelters etc..) I love it. We can enjoy this map thanks to the guys at http://www.opencyclemap.org/



The trail above is a summer ascent to the Mont Blanc peak in the French Alps climbed and shared in Wikiloc by Ivar Thorolfsson

If you know another public map service please tell me and I'll try to add it to the current map list. I've had several requests from you to add more maps from Russia, Canada, France etc.. and I'm still working on them since they require to dive into GIS geeky stuff including coordinate reprojections. I cannot advance a date, hope to add them to Wikiloc soon. Thanks!

--Jordi

Your trails look better in Wikiloc

I'm excited to bring you news about a recent improvement in wikiloc.com to improve the resolution of all the beautiful photos taken along the trails.

All scaled photos and thumbnails (above half a million) shown on the site have been regenerated using a better compression algorithm and now they look nicer:

Before:

Now:

Subtle but important to keep quality high across the site

Your original photos are kept unchanged as you uploaded them, this improvement only applies to the resized versions shown at wikiloc.com.

Hope you like it!

[Update] These photos were taken by ClipperCreekWanderer along Lake Powel-Rainbow bridge /Echo camp and Bryce Canyon NP-Navajo loop trails, both in Utah (USA)

Wikiloc in Polish!

Thanks to Grzegorz and Zbigniew Ilków wikiloc is fully translated to Рolish (Polski). As always, any help to bring down language barriers is highly appreciated, if you wish to volunteer translating to your language just drop me an e-mail at jordi A T wikiloc.com. Thanks a lot!

Please visit the about Wikiloc page for the complete list of volunteers.

New features

I'm glad to bring you two new features recently added to Wikiloc.com:

• While drawing a trail on a map, you can now work with a maximized map that covers most of your screen and also you may choose between Google Maps or third party maps like USGS topo, ICC topo, etc.. I'm working in several additional maps that you've recently suggested. Having a choice to switch between maps is useful when you know that there is a trail that is not visible in the satellite view, perhaps covered by trees. In those cases, a topographic map could be of help:
  

• There has been some not so visual work behind the scenes too, like correcting the elevation profile graphs for all trails (that's +100.000) that now display elevation-distance (instead of elevation-time as before). Additionally elevation data has been automatically calculated to all trails with lack of height value on their coordinates. Thanks to all of you who have contacted me directly or in the forum raising the need to fix it. Now all trails in Wikiloc should have elevation data (if you discover one that do not, please tell me..)
  
  Oh! and try to move the mouse over the elevation profile graph! hope you find it useful :-)
  

[UPDATE]

Another small improvement that will surely make it easier to maintain your trails. Aside from editing from "your trails" page, you may also start editing from the trail page itself. The icon is right below the trail's name, above the map:



Jordi

Wikiloc winner of the Geotourism Challenge!

I'm excited to bring you this news. A recognition from Ashoka Changemaker's and National Geographic to Wikiloc as a community, to all of us who share beautiful outdoor trails and photos in wikiloc.com.


My sincere thanks to all of you that have voted for Wikiloc and made this huge achievement possible. The number of votes has been really high as well as the emails of support I've got from you.

Aside from a better hardware infrastructure, I hope that this will also accelerate several improvements on the site that are in the pipe.

Many thanks!

--Jordi

Tiny gadget for your blog

Do you have a blog and would like to show off your latest outdoor trails? you may do it easily: access your profile by clicking on your username at the upper-right section of Wikiloc, grab the HTML code under "Blog Widget" and paste it to your blog.

Here's mine:

That was a Sunday morning hack so if you detect some issue please tell me at jordi -AT- wikiloc.com and I'll fix it ASAP :-) I appreciate your feedback


Hope you like it!

--Jordi