Ouch! It’s been a full year without me posting in this category?! 
The last year feels like it was tons and tons of backend work throughout the site - lots of code updates around activity syncing, and a large rework of city update process. In reviewing the changes for this post, I’m noticing a few things that I’ve created but haven’t fully followed-through on.
added ability to gift Supporter access to others- added badges including a 100 badge for anyone who has ever completed a city
- these badges are also available in the merch store as sticker, magnet, or button
- city borders are now automatically updated monthly
- include total distance of streets in city pages
- your view of the city (when you visit the city from your profile) includes a “stats” tab, which displays the number of activities, total distance, and when you started
- cities beta page
- there’s a page that Supporters have acces to which displays all city borders on the map
- the intention here is to figure out a usable way to bring this functionality into the maps displayed throughout the site
- add a page that lists links to articles about/including CityStrides that I’m aware of
- built out a not-yet-announced “Offers” feature
- keep an eye on the Instagram account
- keep an eye on the Instagram account
- created a new Challenge that will run only on Halloween: Nightmare RUN
- every street on the map is labeled Elm Street, how many Elm Streets can you finish in one day?
- every street on the map is labeled Elm Street, how many Elm Streets can you finish in one day?
tons and tons of backend work throughout the site- reworked the ads throughout the site
- they’re smaller, to be more polite with their screen use
- all the ads are internal, either for becoming a Supporter or for merchandise
- there is no external ad placement, which means no user tracking or third-party javascript
- update some site displays to be live-syncing
- for these stats, there’s no need to refresh the page to see the new information
- as new activities are synced into CityStrides, they’re streamed into your profile page
- completed/progressed counts are updated live as they’re calculated
- updated how friends are displayed in your profile page
- it behaves a little bit like ‘stories’ that you see in other places like Instagram
- your friends are highlighted if they have new accomplishments
- clicking on your friends displays a compact stats display
- this list is in one of the tabs on your profile page
- updated user avatars to dynamically build (some nicely derpy) faces if no image has been uploaded
- condense what used to be a split pages - homepage / user profile page - into a single profile page
- while logged in, the homepage redirects you to your profile page
- all the info that was in the previous logged-in-homepage is now in your profile page
- finally got a replacement for Dark Sky, to get weather information added to Supporter activities
- old activities are still being backfilled, which will take a while, but new Supporter activities all have weather data now
- expanded notifications, and allow finer control over opting into specific notifications
- decreased the map animations throughout most of the site
- there was a lot of ‘flying around’ which you had to wait to fully animate before you could interact with the page … this irritated a lot of people, so now it’s a quick jump when navigating across pages
- put in some further efforts to make the site operate as a PWA
- there’s no offline support, but it seems to be working well when added to your homescreen