New Ride Proposal Functionality On Trail Pages...

For the past week this blog has been rather quiet, which can mean one of two things. I've been abducted by the cute, but sometimes scary gnomes that live in my garden -or- I've been nose deep in my code inspired to make TrailCentral a better place to surf. Lucky for me (Those gnomes can bite, you know?), I've been inspired to code.

I've been busy making improvements to the section of the trail pages that allow you to submit ride proposals. What is a ride proposal? Well, it was my attempt at making TrailCentral a bit more Web 2.0 before it was cool to say "Web 2.0." Truly, I had the idea of ride proposals years ago and it was simply a method to allow members of my site to propose a time and a place to meet for a ride. Other members would then be allowed to add themselves to the ride roster. Really, it is a simple way to organize a ride with others riders who may be friends or future friends that want to ride with you.

I always thought it was a cool idea, but I never truly implemented it correctly, which in turn never gave it a fair shake at being successful. Let me explain why.

First off, I use to only allow members of my site to create and join ride proposals. In hindsight, this was a big mistake and vastly limited the usefulness of the feature. I've changed that and I now let anyone create and join rides.

Plus, I upgraded the method in which a rider joins. It was once a clunky series of screens and drop down that you would have to navigate. Now, thanks to AJAX, I do everything on the fly and it doesn't require a single page refresh, which makes creating and adding rides a more efficient process.

Finally, ride proposals are available in a feed, allowing you to know whenever a trail on TrailCentral has a ride proposal submitted. I updated the code today and for some reason I was limiting the ride notes to 250 characters, which was nothing sort of a dumb thing to do. What was I thinking? The web is meant to be free and if you want the information, you should get all of it, right? Well, I fixed that and now when you subscribe to the feed, which I encourage you to do, you will be notified in your reader within hours of the ride proposal being submitted on TrailCentral.com.

So, this is actually just me writing for the sake of writing. I plan to write several more posts about the new functionality as a means of documentation. I hope you will take the time to read them because although the functionality is incredibly simple to use it is also nice to know exactly what it does.

Stay tuned...