April Works in Progress

9 May 2023 by Pearl

April was been a work-in-progress month for me and Craig at Wandrer. I’ve taken a step back, working fewer hours as our baby grows older and more interactive (and thus cuter and more fun, but also more demanding of attention and energy). Craig has been chipping away at some bigger projects that we’ll share more about in future updates. Here’s what’s new:

Wandrer Patches Are Now For Sale

We’re delighted to launch the sale of Wandrer patches. We can ship globally and you may choose between a hiking capybara, cycling sloth, or jogging tapir (or get all three). Craig and I have very much enjoyed seeing pictures of these patches in the wild after shipping them out to winners in March’s Sign Appreciation Month. We hope you enjoy adorning your gear with a little Wandrer swag.

Wandrer Partnership with the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area Alliance

Wandrers local to the Atlanta area have a chance to earn a prize by completing all 30 miles / 50 km of PATH trail inside the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area before May 15. Craig and I had a lovely day a couple of weekends ago exploring the dedicated pedestrian/cyclist trail and look forward to heading back this weekend to finish. Our thanks to the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area Alliance for the idea and the prizes!

Changes Coming to the Strava 3rd Party Software Development Program

As you may have heard, Strava is updating their 3rd party software development program. We use this program to access your Strava GPS recordings in order to generate the Wandrer data you know and love. We don’t know any details about the change other than that we’ll need to re-apply for access to the Strava application programming interface (API) within the next 6 months and that our access to Strava data may change. We’ll keep you posted once we know more.

Improvements to Untraveled Roads Infrastructure

This month Craig invested some time into improving how we show the untraveled roads and never-traveled roads to upgraded Wandrers to make loading faster and the data more reliable. This type of change usually isn’t visible to you (at least, that’s our goal), but it helps keep the site running smoothly.

Links to Arena Dashboards from the Big Map

I added links to Arena dashboards to the Big Map pop-up window. We hope these links will make it a little easier to find your progress in different regions. See below for an example.

New Long Distance Route Achievements

We are working on adding EuroVelo 1 and the East Coast Greenway routes as achievements. It’s taking some time to process the data for these routes (they are long routes!), but they are happening.

Map Updates are Paused for Infrastructure Improvements

We recently started a major site upgrade for how we process map data from OpenStreetMap. Our new approach will allow us to further streamline map updates and to allow us to create routes automatically that optimize traveling on new roads. As you might imagine, processing map data is at the core of what we do at Wandrer - this project touches nearly everything. Map updates are paused until we get our new approach in place. I’ll provide an update at the end of May to let y’all know how it’s going.

FAQ WIP

Last month, I started writing a detailed FAQ page to provide better documentation on how Wandrer works. If you have a topic that you think I should include in the FAQ, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Media Recs

I’ll leave you with some fun media links that reference Wandrer:

• A local news feature on walking every road in Berkeley (featuring Ravioli)
• An article about riding every single road in St. Louis in Terrain magazine
• Our thanks to Chris Mayhew for spreading the love of exploring new roads via Wandrer on the Stoked on Spokes Podcast (full podcast about Pittsburgh cycling; Wandrer shout out at 59:30).

Related Stories: