I've been quite remiss in keeping you guys updated on what I've been working on.

My hope is to correct that going forward. As a number have told me, "It's a tall order for one guy to try to do what you're doing."

For this latest update, I've been focusing on notifications because the test rides we've done demonstrated that far too many notification emails were being generated by rides. 

If you go to the Notification Email settings page (upper right corner of the site, click the gear icon, 3rd menu item from the bottom) you will notice there is now a section for "Rides".

This is where you can set what emails you'd like to receive (or just uncheck them all to not receive any.)

By default, for rides you are following, emails will be sent for these notification types:

- When the status of a ride changes. (underway, over)
- When a rider posts an update
- When a rider posts a photo.

A "rider" is someone who has set themselves as "going" on the ride as opposed to someone who is set to "maybe" or "watching". My thought is if you're watching a ride, you're probably most interested in what the riders are posting.

There are separate option for getting notified about posts by lurkers. 

You can enable "rider status" to see things like when they mark themselves as 'underway', 'heading home', 'home safe', 'stopped', or 'broken down'. 

I expect to have to go in and add some further refinements. We'll see how well this works. Per AGrip's suggestion, I plan to add per-ride settings so you can adjust how many emails you get per-ride.

At present, you will still receive the flood of notifications in the site dropdown for rides you are following. At some point, I will add a way to pare that down as well. 

If you have any thoughts on notifications or if you have thoughts on improvements you'd like to see, please reply here. 

iOS 11 (iPhone) is buggy to the point that it breaks popup windows on most sites.
I've just installed a large update to the site which hopefully works around that problem and also fixes a number of problems with popups not being usable in certain circumstances on an iPhone. If you use the site on an iPhone or iPad and notice problems, please let me know.

Thanks!

We got a bunch of users to the site and they promptly starting reporting a bunch of problems.
There were some issues with popup windows not sizing correctly which I think I've fixed. Ben Mendis, could I trouble you to repeat that experiment with small sizes?
There were also a number of issues I've fixed with the login, registration, confirmation, and invitation features. 
Some have been reporting that they are getting a "Validation Error" on trying to log in. If you get an error like that please contact me via the Contact link at the top. 

Quoting of forum posts works again as does editing. 

As always, as you run into the inevitable issues, please let me know. If I can reproduce it I can fix it.

Yep, it appears to be fixed. At least for Chrome. 

oh cool. Thank you for checking that out Ben Mendis. 
iOS11 broke input fields the are children of containers using CSS position:fixed when the content of the page is longer than the viewport. The specific effect was that the cursor would show up at the bottom of the screen. 

So now I'm doing all the positioning and scroll management myself long hand. It's error prone. 

A number of map GPX Upload/Download fixes and improvements installed. GPX support on maps here should now be good enough to enable using them as a GPX archive.

Tomorrow I'll write up how to use them.

As pointed out by cepal, names and usernames were not accepting non-USA characters. 
I've installed an update that /should/ address that issue. 

Added some minor bugfixes. Continuing to work on more.

Coming soon, I'll be adding an update to how the daily digest works so you can set it to daily, weekly, or off.

I'm also going to be working on making notifications less voluminous.

Just when I thought I was making some progress ...
Back in the dawn of time, after having written relatively large online applications in C, C++, and Perl, I was tasked with developing code that could more easily be installed on restricted commodity servers. PHP was an upcoming (gawdawful) little language that was widely used by many of my customers, including the Air Force.

So I held my nose, swallowed what little remained of my pride, and adopted PHP. I was skeptical about my decision and constantly looked at other languages but in the end, in my context, PHP made the most sense. I have, in the intervening years, written a truly massive quantity of PHP code that I use now to run https://miles-by-motorcycle.com.

But PHP was super slow. Getting it to perform even modestly well has been a challenge.

However, very large companies have been built on PHP. Facebook, for example, has built their entire stack in PHP and when reading about their reasons for using the language, it mirrored my own thinking. This was encouraging.

When Facebook released HHVM (HipHopVM) as a very high performance drop in replacement for PHP, I jumped on it even doing a small bit of work with the developers to fix a few issues in their platform. I proudly contributed a "if" statement to them as a patch which they accepted making me a bonafide contributor. They were wonderfully helpful, humble, and some of the most competent developers I've ever come across. I have not had the same experience trying to work with PHP devs, which was another reason I was happy to abandon PHP.

I've been using HHVM ever since and it /rocks/.

The PHP folks, seeing the writing on the wall, have been busy trying to improve their language and have produced PHP7 which by all indications is an improvement and performs somewhere close to HHVM. It, however, makes a number of major changes to the PHP language such that any significant code (like mine) cannot use PHP7 without a significant bit of work and testing.

To my horror, Facebook has decided not to maintain compatibility with PHP7 and is now going in their own direction. Apparently, they are abandoning PHP compatibility in it's entirety. That's fine, I thought. My code will still run but eventually I will have to choose sides as both groups will start making changes to the language which will force me to update my code.

I talked to Duncan about this at length trying to decide "do I stick with HHVM or do I bite the likely few (several?) week effort and move to PHP7?"

The thought was to wait and see how things shake out before making a decision.

Today I have learned that large projects that I depend on have, some time ago, chosen sides.And to my surprise, many of the key ones I use are choosing PHP7.

At long last, I've reworked how the daily digest emails work.

You can now set how often you would like to receive them:

- daily
- weekly
- monthly
- not at all

Just log in, click on the gear icon in the upper right, and then select Digest Email Settings.

A few groups have started on the site, so now you'll receive a digest for each group to that has new activity.

The digest email itself should now be readable on various phones. Strangely, Gmail renders emails completely differently depending on whether or not you're pulling from their servers or someone else's. 

The digest now includes new blog articles, map, and rideplans that have been posted. 

If you have selected not to receive emails and are suddenly receiving them again, please let me know ASAP.  I tried to be careful updating that code but there's always the chance that I made a mistake. 

As my buddy mothman is fond of saying, "by mistrial and error". 
So let's try this again.

The digests can now be set to 'daily', 'weekly', or 'off' by logging in and then clicking on the gear icon in the upper right corner and selecting "Digest Email Notifications". 

Slowly more groups are coming online so now you can receive digests for any group you're a member of (when it has any activity). 

I've installed an update that I've been working on for some time. This update reworks how notifications and emails work to be more in line with what we see on the big social networks. 

This will be particularly visible if you participate in one of the rides on the site. There should be significantly less notifications and emails. 

Being a fresh update which affects a number of core parts of the system, I suspect there will likely be a few problems to track down so if you see anything weird please let me know. 

I've made some updates to how posting of links work.

Previously, if you just pasted a link, a truncated version of the link would be added to the text. Or you could click the link button on the bottom of the post box in order to embed a nice link card in the content. I prefer the cards since it's more visual and it then lets us search for them. 

The change now is that when you paste a link into the text, it'll (if it works as it's supposed to), automatically raise the "link details" popup which will fetch the details from the target site. You can add some tags or tweak the name and description and just click Embed to embed the web card in the text.

For instance, this is a link on amazon to my favorite multi-tool: 

There was a bug where if you clicked on a notification it would give you a page not found error. This only occurred under Safari on MacOSX and iOS which is why it took a little while to track down.

Sorry about that.

Notifications should be working correctly again. 

Sorry about that guys. The site was throwing a scary "this connection is not secure" error because while I had dutifully put a reminder in my calendar to install the replacement certificate, I failed to do so and of course the certificate expired at 13:30 yesterday while I was on the Blue Ridge Parkway. 

I've installed the new cert and everything seems to be working again.

Sorry about that.