What's new at Wandrer: February 2023

28 February 2023 by Pearl

Another month has flown by, very quickly as our time has been divided between working on Wandrer, finishing our bike tour in Taiwan, and taking care of our sweet little growing baby. So what have we been up to at Wandrer?

New Activities Page Design

I finished an update to the design of the Activities overview page and the detailed individual Activity page. We hope that the new design makes for a more pleasant and intuitive experience as you interact with the site. As part of the new Activity page, there is now a tooltip to show you the total length of your activity and how much of the activity’s GPS trace matched to a road in Wandrer’s map. This feature should help you recognize if the OpenStreetMap data needs to be updated in the area surrounding your activity. To view this data, hover your cursor over your New Miles. If you find this feature useful and want the total length and matched length to be featured more prominently on your activity page, please do reach out and let us know. We are always curious to hear what data is of interest.

See your total ride length and matched length with the new activity page design.

Toggle unpaved roads visibility on your map

I also added a feature to the map that lets you choose if you want to view your Untraveled roads that are unpaved. If you prefer that your map not show unpaved roads when you load it, you can change your default map view in the Preferences section of the Settings page. We hope this option makes it easier for those of you who prefer not to ride unpaved roads to see your relevant untraveled roads.

Toggling visibility for unpaved roads and changing your default map view

We’ve added long distance trails

We now have several long distance trails in Wandrer as Achievements: the Trans Canada Trail, Bay Area Ridge Trail, San Francisco Bay Trail, Pacific Crest Trail and Appalachian Trail. These are available as Explorer Achievements on the dashboard for the containing region.

Viewing the Appalachian Trail achievement

Craig’s updated so many map regions

In the last month, Craig has updated 337 map regions. As of 28 February, there are 377 pending map update requests. If you’ve placed a request and are still waiting, we’re sorry! At the moment, it does take time for our servers to make the new map data and update the activities in the region. Craig has been hard at work on a new update system that should be faster and easier for us to maintain. We’ll share more details once we get closer to implementing it.

337 map updates completed in February 2023!

Super Unique Distance View is in Progress

We hoped to have this feature ready to share by the end of this month but didn’t quite get there. We are populating the data for viewing your “Super Unique” distance on a map and checking that the data are accurately updated when activities are processed and updated to new map data. Super Unique roads are ones that you have traveled that no other Wandrer has completed (you can see your Super Unique distance for 2022 in your Yearly Summary).

We’re Getting Patches

I am delighted to report that we have iron-on patches in production! The samples look charming. We will sell these patches as another way to support Wandrer and adorn your gear. Look for prices and more details in late March / early April.

Sign Appreciation Month is Coming!

Last but certainly not least, we’re celebrating signs in March and giving prizes! You can read all of the details here. Participate by sending images of signs you love by Instagram / Twitter / email for the chance to win a gift subscription to Wandrer and one of our new patches!

Finished our Taiwan tour and heading home

As I mentioned at the beginning of this update, we’ve finished our bike tour of Taiwan. In the end, we rode 1270.7 unique km / 789.6 unique mi / 1.23% of the country. We explored many small country roads, our baby was adopted by a kind and generous pair of grandparents, and we ate a ton of delicious food. The baby also experienced many firsts during the last month - sitting up, eating, and getting very close to crawling. It’s been a wonderful trip and we’re both a little sad to see it end even as we’re excited to return home to friends and family.

That’s it for this month’s update! As always, you can reach Craig and me with your questions and comments.

Goodbye Taiwan, we will miss you.

Related Stories: