RaceNation News

Hi everyone!

You may have noticed that we rolled out a major upgrade to RaceNation over the weekend.  This has been in the works for several months and it may take several blog posts to cover it all.   So, I'm just going to give you the highlights in this one.

New Activity Feeds

The My News (on your Home Page) and Recent Activity (on your profile pages) sections, which previously only showed blog posts, have been expanded to include lots of other stuff: new photos, wall comments, friendships, memberships, and workouts.  We also merged the comment wall with the Recent Activity feed, which shows things in context a bit better.  We also provide a link if you want the "old" comment wall view. 

Status Message

We've also added a "status message" feature in the upper left corner of your home page, where you can let us know what's going on with you.  It doesn't have to be about racing, and it's a great alternative to writing a blog entry if you just want to let people know what's going on with you.

The New Activity Search

We've added a new Activities section that you can use to find stuff to do in your area.  It's pretty sophisticated - you can filter by sport, distance and pace, sort by proximity to you, and you can also map the results like you can when searching for races.  So for all you group owners out there, be sure to update your activities with the sport, distance, and pace (if applicable) so that people can find them. 

One of the major goals of RaceNation is to help people find other people to train with.  This is a major step in that direction, and there are more to come.

The New "Talk" Section

The new Talk section pulls together blog posts, discussions, and announcements from all over the site.  You can browse by sport, categories, and tags, or you can do a full text search.  We think that this is an improvement over the conventional approach to forums.  I'll elaborate more in a later post.  Suffice to say that are goal is to 

1. Let people post wherever they think it most appropriate, whether it be in your personal blog, in one of your groups, or in a public forum
   
2. Enable everyone to find useful information without having to hunt and peck everywhere for it
3. Provide a rich structure for categorizing information, one that we hope will be much more effective than the 5-20 forums you get on a conventional discussion board.
4. Enable people to get updates to their favorite topics via RSS feeds

Group Forums

Related to the new "Talk" section, we've enabled "Forums" for Groups (for example here's the RaceNation Support  forum).  Several people have asked for a better place to have group discussions than the comment wall.  The comment walls are best used for short remarks.  It can be tedious to have a conversation  because everything is all mixed together.  So in this release we provide you with the ability to enable a "Forum" for your group where people can have real discussions.  

If you go edit your group and go to the Advanced tab, there is an option to enable it.  

Find (and Invite) Your Friends on RaceNation!

We've added the ability for you to import your contact list from GMail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail.  With this feature, you authorize us to peek at your contact list and we will find anyone who is already on RaceNation and also give you the option to quickly invite your other friends to join.   

More Training fields

We've also added some more fields to the workout entry form.  Let us know what you think.

We Want Your Feedback!

We understand that this is a lot of change in a short period of time.  We'd love to know what you think about it.  If you see any kinks or have any questions, please don't hesitate to let us know over at RaceNation Support.  

Also, if you've got any bright new ideas, share them with us at RaceNation Development.

Do you have an interesting story about a RaceNation experience or someone you met through racenation.com?  

A major news source is writing an article about racenation.com, and they want to share your stories with their audience . If you would like to share a story, please email the highlights to chad@racenation.com. Please be sure to include your contact information so the media can follow up with a phone interview if required.

Thanks everyone!

Hi everyone!  We just rolled out some more improvements to the site and I wanted to tell you about them briefly.

Race Search - New Map View!

We just added a new map view to the Race Search to help you find races near you.

Check it out:

Searching within Friends, Group and Race Members

Some of you have started to rack up some pretty big friend lists, as well as long membership lists for Groups and Races.  So, we've added a search box that you can use to search through each group of people.

Group Activity Improvements!

We've added the ability for you to list the pace and distance of each of your group training activities.  (Note that you must select a type, i.e. run, cycle, or swim, for your training activity, in order to use this feature).  We've tried to improve the general usability of the Group Activity forms to make it easier for you to create and edit them.

RSS feeds for Blogs!

In response to some of your feedback, we've added RSS feeds to all public RaceNation blogs (read more about RSS here).  Most blog readers will simply discover the feed if you navigate to the blog page, or you can get the link by clicking the RSS icon in the lower right corner of the blog's main page.

Then you can add the feed to any number of applications that have RSS support.  Like your iPhone, or iGoogle:

or Google Reader

Favorites and Notifications

This feature can be a big help in keeping up with conversations you are trying to follow.  If you add a blog post or announcement to your favorites by simply clicking the star next to its title so that it turns gold, you will receive notifications (via email or SMS) every time someone comments on that post.  If you want to stop receiving notifications, simply remove it from your favorites by clicking the star again and turning it gray.  Also, blog post or announcement that you author will automatically be added to your favorites (because we figure you usually want it to), but you can remove it later. 

"Draft" Blog Entries

If you start writing a blog entry or announcement and decide you want to finish it later, you can now just click "Save as Draft" and then return to it later and publish it.

Hi everyone!  We just updated the site, so if you got a "RaceNation is temporarily down for maintenance" message, that's what it was about (We did it on purpose).

We've been really thrilled with the activity we've seen on RaceNation over the past few weeks.  We've got a real community here, and that's exciting.  Even more exciting is the personality of this community:  Everyone is so friendly,  affirming, and enthusiastic.  We love it.

And because we love you so much, we're constantly working on new features to help connect and empower you.  Here's what's new in this release...

Training!

We've added the ability for you to log training activities, graph them, and compare with your friends.

There's a new Training Log link in your home, along with a box containing your last 5 workouts:

You can view summary statistics for various date ranges:

And also chart your distance and pace and compare them with those of your friends:

This is just the beginning of RaceNation Training.  We plan on continually adding to and improving on what we've released today.  Our general strategy with most of our features is to start simple and then add more sophistication based on the usage we see and the feedback we get from the user community (so don't hesitate to comment or make suggestions over at RaceNation Development).  That is definitely the case with training.  There are lots of training tools out there, and we didn't want to re-invent the wheel, nor did we want to make the same mistakes that those tools do.  For example:

• There are lots of tiny differences between the formats and categories that people use, so we are being particularly careful about "categories" of training.
• Many training tools track a ton of information
  
  • But they don't give you any useful way to analyze it.
  • And feeling like you need to enter all that stuff might deter you from actually logging anything

Also, RaceNation is about community, and so RaceNation Training is also about community.  We aren't interested in competing with every personal training tool out there.  To that end, we built the ability for you to export your training log (and we are planning on building an import as well) so that you don't feel like you have to choose between RaceNation and something else. 

That said, we do want to give you the best training tools we can while still maintaining our emphasis on community, and we think we can come up with something that will work great for the majority of us.

We think this is going to be a lot of fun.   We'd love to get your feedback.  Let us know what you think and we'll see what we can do.

Group Widgets!

I mentioned widgets in a recent blog post in RaceNation Development.  Widgets are basically little windows into the RaceNation world that you can put on any website you like.  It's especially useful for adding fresh content to Race and Group websites that don't change much throughout the year.  Now any group on the site can have its own widgets.   Just configure your widgets using our generator, shown below, and then add the little code snippet to your website where you'd like each widget to display.

Some Style Upgrades

We've been making some style tweaks here and there.  For example, the Event Search now groups races together under the main event. 

And we're also showing more stuff in the footer, since people really like to use it to keep up with what's going on across the site.

We hope you like where we're going with this stuff!  And if you don't, just let us know.  I can't say it enough -- we really value your feedback.