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Show HN: Free, open-source site for finding beautiful hikes

hike.io

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Re: Show HN: Free, open-source site for finding beautiful hikes

#71

Post by _mulder_ »

zakn wrote: post #23
alan_cx wrote: post #21

Just my personal thoughts as a hiker; not a hacker, HNer or what ever. Firstly: Dont be disheartened by my criticism which will follow. Its a decent first attempt, the idea is absolutely worth working on, and could become a valuable resource for a lot of people. On to the criticism.... What goes in the search? Are hikes named? Do I need to know the name to search for? Search for a location? From the first page, what…

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…

Perhaps take a look at AirBnB and the way they categorise some of their 'highlight' hosts. Perhaps you could suggest similar categories, "Scottish Hikes", "Mountains", "Ice Hikes", "River Hikes", "Best of Asia", etc. I appreciate you need some more hikes adding to the pool before you can do this (I'll add one later tonight).

Another idea regarding the usefulness of the landing page. Whilst I like to browse the hikes from other countries as some of them look very spectacular, it's not particularly useful to me. Perhaps with a bit of work you could do a 'get location by IP Address' or something similar and thereby suggest hikes local to me, or at least in the same country/continent.

Re: Show HN: Free, open-source site for finding beautiful hikes

#72

Post by zakn »

mason240 wrote: post #65
zakn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really don't have problem with ads. As much as I love building things, there is a definite opportunity cost that comes with spending time in front of the computer that could be spent, you know, actually hiking with my family. The overall design looks very nice so Google adsense type ads would take away from that. Have you thought about getting individual trails "sponsored" by a local outfitter? In the info box on t…

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.

Re: Show HN: Free, open-source site for finding beautiful hikes

#73

Post by zakn »

_mulder_ wrote: post #71
zakn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perhaps take a look at AirBnB and the way they categorise some of their 'highlight' hosts. Perhaps you could suggest similar categories, "Scottish Hikes", "Mountains", "Ice Hikes", "River Hikes", "Best of Asia", etc. I appreciate you need some more hikes adding to the pool before you can do this (I'll add one later tonight). Another idea regarding the usefulness of the landing page. Whilst I like to browse the hikes…

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.

Re: Show HN: Free, open-source site for finding beautiful hikes

#75

Post by zakn »

stevewilhelm wrote: post #74

Wondering from where you are sourcing your photos.

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.

Re: Show HN: Free, open-source site for finding beautiful hikes

#76

Post by KevinBongart »

Hi, this is awesome!

Hopefully useful feedback: when I saw that, I immediately thought "what are some nice hikes around where I live?" and even though the tagline is "Find beautiful hikes", the homepage doesn't suggest that I can find the answer here. Maybe that's not the point of hike.io, maybe there's another website that would help me better, I don't know.

Anyway, the big picture of the Narrows, which is one of the very few hikes I've done, inspired me to look for new trails around where I live. Thanks for that!

And good luck, I can't wait to see how hike.io will grow!

Re: Show HN: Free, open-source site for finding beautiful hikes

#77

Post by lukejduncan »

Is there an opportunity to use this to build on a dataset like Open Street Maps? I don't know much about that space, but it seems to me that your users will either be consuming hiking trail maps, or generating them. If they are generating them it'd be awesome if there were a way to contribute the data to some copyleft source. Assuming that's something you're willing to do.

Admittedly, Google Maps is much prettier than I remember.

Re: Show HN: Free, open-source site for finding beautiful hikes

#78

Post by coldpie »

zakn wrote: post #66
atjoslin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He means if I type 'Seattle, WA' then what is the 'search radius' around Seattle that I will get for hikes?

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.

If the purpose of the site is to find new hikes, presumably we don't already know the name of the hike we want :)

What I expected was a location-based thing: show me hikes near where I live. I would find that tremendously useful.

Good start!

Re: Show HN: Free, open-source site for finding beautiful hikes

#79

Post by coldpie »

gms7777 wrote: post #67

It's a very nice looking site. Here are some ideas for future things that I would find useful at least: - Dated reviews and pictures. This is one of the biggest things I look for when searching out hikes and haven't found a reliable site for - Hiking buddies? I think adding an "I want to hike this" button, and having some way for people to contact each other and plan hikes would be cool and I'd definitely take advant…

Hiking buddies is a neat idea. You could choose to share an email address (anonymized, similar to how Craigslist does it) and have it expire after a reasonable amount of time.

Re: Show HN: Free, open-source site for finding beautiful hikes

#80

Post by coldpie »

zakn wrote: post #11
sytelus wrote: post #6

Tried out several popular hikes in Washington and didn't find any. Almost every state has outdoor organization which maintains trail list. You should consider scrapping them and seeding your site (I believe most sites are open & nonprofit). For Washington, it's wts.org.

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...

Minnesota has Scientific and natural areas ("SNAs"). They're listed online, but I don't know if they're easily scrapeable.

I think scraping stuff like this would be a good start to get an initially useful set of data started. I know I'd love a better map for SNAs.

http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/snas/index.html

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