zakn

Shopping for groceries. I made a website which lets my wife and I pick recipes and any "one off" items we need for the week. The code figures out which ingredients it should buy (preferring organic / sale items) and then calls the "APIs" of our local grocery store's website to make the purchase. We then just have to pick up the pre-packed groceries on our way home from work.

It costs $5 for the packing service, but it's worth it to avoid the burden of shopping. No more tedious math on which is the better deal. No getting lost trying to find avocado oil. And no lines. I wish I had done this years ago.

My brother and I are about to release yet another spiritual successor to Lemmings [0]. It has similar gameplay, but more interesting items (flip gravity, portal guns, etc.) and trickier puzzles. As much as I loved Lemmings, it gets a bit tedious once you figure out the stopper / builder combo.

[0] - https://applepinegames.com/inklings

(Sorry, rereading what I wrote makes it sound pretty slanderous). Not sure if you'll be doubling back on this, but I thought I'd respond anyway. I was talking about the mobile web experience, specifically on Android.

I was playing with the MapBox SDK roughly a year ago and I remember having a lot of trouble at the time panning and zooming. This was on a Droid X. So gave up on it at the time, even though I thought the desktop experience was so great.

Anyway, I just tested again, and whatever I was seeing before is not there. I'll give MapBox another shot.

That's awesome that you got inspired by my picture. That hike is inspiring, probably my favorite of all time.

Thanks for the feedback too. I want to support finding nearby hikes in two ways:

1. If you go to the maps page, it should zoom you into your location and show you hikes nearby. That part works, but I also wish it zoomed out when no hikes are within your current viewport.

2. Also (and this part isn't done), I wish there was a way to filter the Discover images by location.

Feel free to add any of your local trails or update the Narrows.

A lot of the pictures up there are ones I've taken. There are others that I've pulled from flickr (after first getting permission from the photographer), for example, the landscape on http://hike.io/hikes/mount-meru, is from a flickr user.

My idea for the future Discover page was that you'd be able to filter the results by location, distance, elevation etc. I'm already using Google's jsapi to zoom the map into your location, but I've seen mixed results with it.

AirBnB is a great example of categories done right. I'll look into that.

Here's my concern with ads. Even if I managed a 2% CTR with a subtle ad, I'd still have 98% of my users carefully avoiding a part of the page that could be devoted to something else.

Someone mentioned affiliate links in a bibliography section. I could see that working because it's not intrusive, but you'd have to be careful not letting your sources be dictated by what's available on Amazon. I like donations because it keeps the financial goals of the site inline with creating the best experience.

I could see sponsorship links working, maybe on the homepage, or maybe in a separate /sponsors page. I'm not completely sure, it's a tricky problem.

I'm going to be looking into OSM because of comments here. I've also looked at MapBox but last time I tried the mobile web experience was basically unusable (although Google Maps isn't great either).

Do you have other suggestions?

Ah got it. At the moment, it would tell you that there are no hikes named "Seattle", since search only works on the name of the hike.

When I add support for searching by location (because this seems to be a popular request), then I think it should zoom you into the location, enough so that you could see all of Seattle. I think this can be done with google's jsapi / google maps but I'm going to have to investigate.

I can see how that would be terribly confusing. Currently, search only works for the name of the hike.

I've added an issue - https://github.com/zaknelson/hike.io/issues/24

If it's any consolation, I'm using the metric system on the backend and plan to add the ability to change your default units. I don't want hike.io to be US-centric.

Multi-trail circuits are not really supported at the moment, but I like the idea. You could hack your way around it currently by creating a "master hike", call it Annapurna Circuit, and then link to the other sub-trails from the master.

I've created issues for both of the things you've mentioned - https://github.com/zaknelson/hike.io/issues

I was hoping that distance + elevation could give a sense of the difficulty without having to create a "difficulty scale". The problem I always have with such scales is that each site is different and their definition of a hard hike is not my definition.

In terms of monetization, all I know at this point is that I want it to be freely available without ads. Beyond that, I'm flexible. A supporter badge could work. I was also thinking it would be cool if there was a way to monetize the pictures. For example, if you could order prints, a portion of the revenue would go to original photographer and hike.io.

I'm not sure I understand the question: "Do place names show hikes in a specific radius?" Are you talking about the orange dots on the map? They correspond to a single hike.

That is annoying that the map doesn't remember where you were. Seems like the best way to handle that is to store your last location in localstore.

Awesome feedback. Especially the part about making the "adding an entry" part easier, it didn't dawn on me that some of that information is redundant.

The reason I've been writing driving directions in a wall of text is because in a lot of cases, google doesn't map all of the forest roads required to get to the trailhead. There are some hikes, like http://hike.io/hikes/mount-rose, which do and in that case I include the link in the Directions header. I thought it might be nice to also include the step by step directions in case you don't have an internet connection, but you're right, it feels extraneous.

And, I'm going to have to investigate OSM, you're the second suggest that.

I appreciate it! For your app idea, if there's anything that fits into hike.io's domain and you want to discuss it, feel free to shoot me an email.

That one was all me. I did the hike, took the pictures, and typed it up. And actually most of the hikes I wrote, although I'm starting to get edits from others. One great example is Mount Meru - http://hike.io/hikes/mount-meru which was done by a good samaritan I've never met.

That's a good question.

At this point, I'd say just add it, since I'd rather have more data. If it becomes a popular resource, I suppose the site will need a clearer definition of what constitutes a hike.

This one was just added by someone on HN. It's a bit like Wikipedia's stub articles. It's not that useful at the moment, but there's something here that should be expanded on in the future. Maybe I'll update it myself when I get some downtime.

Here was my reasoning. There are 3 main use cases:

1. I know exactly which hike I'm looking for. I type it in, and there it is (I know that currently that is almost never true, but let's assume there is a good number of hikes on there already).

2. I want to find hikes near me - rather than type it in, I go to the Maps tab. It should automatically zoom me into my location, to display hikes near me.

3. I want to explore new hikes, not necessarily close to me. That's where the Discover tab is useful.

Watching the logs and reading the comments here, I'm finding that it's very natural to search for a location as well. I'm adding it to my TODO.

Maybe it's a loop hike? I'm not sure, I will have to ask my girlfriend, she added that one :)

Thanks! All changes go through a review process before they are pushed live. I get an email for each change and then can either accept or reject it.

I'm using Mailgun to do the mail stuff: https://github.com/zaknelson/hike.io/blob/master/server/util...

I appreciate the feedback, especially as a fellow hiker.

A number of people now have mentioned that the first page is not working, so that's something I'm going to reevaluate. I need more info there beyond a daunting search box. At the moment, you can type in the name of a hike and it will show up, e.g. try "The Narrows". The site assumes hikes are named. If you're searching for a location, then you need to go to the maps. I should probably support searching for a location via the search box, e.g. if you search for colorado it will show you all the hikes in colorado, or zoom you into colorado on the map.

Maps. Currently the way to get to the maps is from the lat / lng link in the info box on the side. This will take you to a full screen map with a dot for that location. From here, I'd like to add support for GPX routes, but that is not implemented. It's interesting that you're keen on having maps as the focus because I find that maps aren't that useful for me when researching a hike, I just want the highlights - distance, elevation gain, elevation max, and then I want to see pictures of what the hike has to offer.

Thanks for the encouragement, I'm taking a lot from these comments and will have plenty to work on.

Trip reports are something I've been thinking about adding for a while. The problem I face at the moment is that they're only useful is you have a very active community. I'm still trying to figure out where hike.io fits into the hiking website ecosystem. Maybe it makes sense to keep it limited to just "wikipedia for hikes" and leaving trip reports to the location specific hikes. I think I'll add support and see what kind of traction I get.

Thanks for the hikr.org link, I haven't come across that one before. And very cool trip tracker of your hikes.

That's some feedback I've heard a couple times now. I was going for simple, but just having the search box only addresses the case where the user already knows what hike they want to find (and actually is pretty useless at the moment, since there are only a handful of hikes on the site).

Putting some more info on the homepage is a good idea, whether that ends up being the Discover page... I'm going to mull on it for a bit. Thanks for taking the time to comment.

If I would have known I'd hit the front page of HN, I would have added more content :) But I agree, there is plenty of good information already out there. For photos, I can probably find Creative Commons versions on flickr. I've already asked about a few and people are surprisingly generous.

And good point about The Narrows. I should have that info on there.

That's a problem I'd love to have. I think the best way to keep a site like this going is through donations, but honestly have no idea whether that is feasible or not.

Funny thing. I actually have a scraper for wta - https://github.com/zaknelson/hike.io/blob/master/scripts/scr...

I haven't seeded production with it yet because I was a bit unsure on whether that was ok to do. Maybe I should send them an email...

Great feedback.

-GPX support is top of my list of TODOs.

-I like the USGS topo / OSM idea. I'll have to do some investigation to see how it compares with Google Maps.

- I agree that a bibliography is a must. This is also something I would have gotten for free with MediaWiki. The reason I didn't build on top of that was, basically because I wanted to have complete control over the end result. Writing the code was the fun part for me. That being said, I wouldn't completely write it off.

- And I did write one scraper already for wta.org, but was unsure about whether that was ok to do or not...

Wow. You made my day, thanks so much.