The ride uploading interface has been upgraded.

This was done mostly to facilitate bigger improvements on that page, but it has a lot of nice new features of its own:

• Titles and descriptions can be edited without having to go into the ride.
• Rides can be optionally sent to Strava (instead of always).
• Rides can be shared to Facebook and Twitter.
• The “type” and “purpose” of rides can be selected.

All uploads are shown on the one map, and it highlights (and zoom in to) the ride when the title or description are being edited. The other button, between the “post to Facebook” button and the title, is a link to go directly to the ride. The numbers at the bottom (“4/4” and “100%”) show how many rides have completed processing, and what proportion of the data has been uploaded (there is a difference between the two).

One caveat of sharing rides to Facebook is that this is not yet using the new “fitness” Open Graph properties, so rides won’t show up on Facebook with a nice map and summary data. Yet.

The “type” of a ride refers to the category of cycling it falls under, such as road or track or cyclocross. The “purpose” refers to it being a training ride, a race, a social ride, a commute, or just a generic ride. Nothing is being done yet with either of these (also, “type” is actually “subtype” — “type” is being reserved for something else…) and they may yet see changes and another layer of categorisation, as time trials could well fall under “road cycling”, and there are lots of different types of mountain biking. When these are being used more broadly in the site, there will be an easy way to change these all at once. To be continued…

Strava uploading has seen big improvements with this, and there are new options on the linked accounts page to work with the new uploader:

• Immediately upload — Rides can be immediately uploaded when they are uploaded. When this is set, all rides are automatically uploaded to Strava, and the following options are unavailable. This is also how this previously worked, and everybody who had Strava uploading set up now has this turned on. When this is not selected, uploading only begins when the “close” button in the ride uploading box is clicked.
• Default checked — This refers to the default state of the checkbox in the uploading interface. Set this depending on whether you plan on uploading most of your rides to Strava, or only some of them. It’s just there for convenience.
• Custom titles — When selected, the title you give the ride in the uploading interface will also be set for the ride on Strava.

In other news, the way the “variability” power metric is displayed has changed. The long and the short of it is that the new values are 100 less than the previous ones. This is because it used to be the ratio between effective power and average power (so 100% is when they’re equal, and it goes up from there when effective power is higher), whereas now it’s the amount that effective power is higher than average power (so 0% is when they’re equal, and it goes up from there). The reason it changed is because 0% is a more intuitive number for “variability” when there is no variability. The only problem is that 100% variability doesn’t mean “total variability” or anything like that, it simply means that effective power was double average power. How everything is calculated has been updated accordingly.

Also, billing is now live, as this site needs to make money if it’s to continue. This site isn’t in any danger of going away any time soon, but it can’t continue to be free forever.

Finally, there is now a Cycling Analytics Twitter account. Follow it!