My Biking Progress and Fun With Google Maps
See below (near the bottom of the page) for what I was alluding to earlier when I was talking about a cool idea for charting my exercise progress.
I thought it would be kind of cool to pick some place to "ride" to. In reality, I'm riding indoors on an exercise bike, but I thought it would be a cool visual "anchor" to plan some long route on a map, and as I rack up the miles on the exercise bike, plot that mileage progress on the map.
I figured I could probably do this with the google maps API ... and turns out I could. There is a LOT to the API, and I was a bit overwhelmed at first. Fortunately, I was able to use this cool example as a starting point. I removed a lot of code and tweaked what was left to get something close to what I wanted. It's still not quite there yet, and its definitely hacked together, but I really wanted to go ahead and put up what I had.
So basically the idea is, for this first "trip", I'm riding my bike from where I live now to the town I grew up in, Mt. Carmel, IL. I elected not to use any street addresses - just the names of the cities, so the actual start and end points are just whatever Google uses as the default. You can pan around and zoom just as if you were on the Google maps site.
Once I get "home", I'll pick another destination. Maybe I'll go "visit" my old stomping grounds in Ft. Wayne, or perhaps take a trip to Atlantic City. Who knows? I think this will be a fun way to chart my progress anyway.
Oh, one other thing I added. I found this site today called dontbreakthechain.com. This is a very simple but cool little web app. Basically, once you set up your account, you have a calendar, and for each day that you accomplish whatever goal you've set for yourself (in my case, exercising) you just click on that day. It changes the color for that day and you gradually build a "chain". Again, it basically serves as a visual anchor and positive reinforcement of the progress you've made. Pretty cool. And they are nice enough to make a little widget version available, so if you look in my sidebar, you can see how I've done for the previous four weeks. Now, I really just started a couple of weeks ago, so don't get on me for the blank spots prior to that. :)
See? I told you I was going to post more often!
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I thought it would be kind of cool to pick some place to "ride" to. In reality, I'm riding indoors on an exercise bike, but I thought it would be a cool visual "anchor" to plan some long route on a map, and as I rack up the miles on the exercise bike, plot that mileage progress on the map.
I figured I could probably do this with the google maps API ... and turns out I could. There is a LOT to the API, and I was a bit overwhelmed at first. Fortunately, I was able to use this cool example as a starting point. I removed a lot of code and tweaked what was left to get something close to what I wanted. It's still not quite there yet, and its definitely hacked together, but I really wanted to go ahead and put up what I had.
So basically the idea is, for this first "trip", I'm riding my bike from where I live now to the town I grew up in, Mt. Carmel, IL. I elected not to use any street addresses - just the names of the cities, so the actual start and end points are just whatever Google uses as the default. You can pan around and zoom just as if you were on the Google maps site.
Once I get "home", I'll pick another destination. Maybe I'll go "visit" my old stomping grounds in Ft. Wayne, or perhaps take a trip to Atlantic City. Who knows? I think this will be a fun way to chart my progress anyway.
Oh, one other thing I added. I found this site today called dontbreakthechain.com. This is a very simple but cool little web app. Basically, once you set up your account, you have a calendar, and for each day that you accomplish whatever goal you've set for yourself (in my case, exercising) you just click on that day. It changes the color for that day and you gradually build a "chain". Again, it basically serves as a visual anchor and positive reinforcement of the progress you've made. Pretty cool. And they are nice enough to make a little widget version available, so if you look in my sidebar, you can see how I've done for the previous four weeks. Now, I really just started a couple of weeks ago, so don't get on me for the blank spots prior to that. :)
See? I told you I was going to post more often!
Read Full Post
posted by eric at
9/12/2007 11:00:00 PM
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