Ask HN: Please review my site... and find a great place to hike | Hacker News Reader

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

Dear HN,

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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

* 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good idea, I can add that.

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