Alright, March was huge and I haven’t had time to post updates so let’s get into it…
City updates were paused for most of March, because of a massive data restructuring project. Those are back on, and the project was a massive success. You won’t see much/any difference from the changes, but that’s kind of the point – for example, the resulting traffic from NYT Coverage - One Cure for Pandemic Doldrums: Walking Every Street in Your City did nothing to slow down or delay anyone. Prior to this data restructuring project, we would have all been delayed (either syncing and/or processing) for many hours and probably several days.
The tail end of March included some graphics work, which leads the way into a test I plan on running through April. I’m currently using Google Adsense for ads on the site, but I don’t like how this affects people’s privacy. So I’m going to see if replacing their ad system with custom ads that market CityStrides merchandise and subscriptions can generate the income that was coming from Adsense.
- made the progressed/completed counts update live when processing is complete - you don’t have to refresh the page to see those counts as they’re calculated
- improve city/street search performance
- improve the performance of the background LifeMap generation jobs
- redesigned the sign up/in pages
- testing out the idea of replacing google ads with custom (read: terrible) ads for merchandise & subscriptions
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major data storage overhaul which took most of March to complete & included a database upgrade and a significant reworking of some background jobs
- one side effect of this is that very long (over 200 miles) activities are not processed any more people out here tracking inter-country flights as walks
- add some info to the privacy page
- made some progress on an issue where some MapMyFitness activities don’t have GPS data via their API, but the activity does have location data
- fix bug where runkeeper sync can’t re-queue itself if something goes wrong
- try to avoid ferries in Route Builder; I use “try” here because if a ferry is the only way to get from point a to point b, then it will use the ferry
- changed the button on the LifeMap to only show the Become A Supporter message once
- allow anonymous route viewing, if the route is configured to allow that
- update the status page to more accurately reflect some updated job queues
- package updates