Blog
New Refinements for Posting While On the Trail
One of our objectives at Outsideways is to create tools that make journaling while on-the-go as easy as possible. Thanks to great feedback from several of our members, we have been gradually making refinements by adding new features and improving the user experience.
A Fool Proof Strategy for Simple, Effective Adventure Journalling
When you are out on an adventure, you have a lot of things going on. At the end of a long day in the fresh air you are tired. You probably won't have the time or energy to string together coherent sentences, nor will you necessarily want to spend a ton of time in front of a device. Outsideways was designed from the ground-up for people who want to remember the tiny details of their adventures without having to write novels. Or essays. Or paragraphs. Or, even complete sentences. We do this by putting technology to work for you.
Mighty Blue Interviews the Von Trapp Family
Outsideways was conceived on a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. If you are not familiar with the story, the ultra-short-version goes something like this: Me, my wife, and our three kids started our thru-hike of the AT in the spring of 2014. We acquired a family trail name of The Von Trapp Family. Only four of us would finish. It was the hardest thing we have ever done in our entire life. Steve Adams (a.k.a. Mighty Blue, a thru-hiker who completed his hike the same year as us) recently interviewed us on his excellent Mighty Blue on the Appalachian Trail podcast.
New Feature: Download Your Journals
One of our goals at Outsideways is to help you organize your information. We want to be the digital dumping ground for all the information you collect on your adventures. Additionally, we believe that your data belongs to you. We want you to be able to download anything you create on Outsideways any time you like.
What's Old is New: RSS Feeds Now Enabled Throughout
Our latest feature is a bit of a geeky one (and a bit old-school as far as the web goes): we now have RSS feeds throughout the site. If you are like me and prefer to consume news updates via a feed reader, keep tabs on the latest in online adventure journals by subscribing to one or more of our feeds.
Journal Spotlight: Guthook's U.K. Walks
Every so often, when we see a journal that is particularly inspiring to us, we will highlight it here to let you know about it. The first journal to receive this honor is Guthooks's U.K. Walks 2017. Guthook's trip (currently in progress) has taken him on the West Highland Way, and now on the Coast to Coast walk. The photos are beautiful, the journal is an easy read, and, best of all, it makes us want to be there.
A Smartphone App and a Road Trip
It has been a while since I posted an update. It is not that there hasn't been much noteworthy going on, on the contrary, there has been a ton of stuff happening lately, I just haven't had the time to talk about it. The two big things happening right now are: We are working on an Outsideways smartphone app, and we are embarking on a road trip.
A Pile of New Features in Beta
Just in time for your upcoming summer adventures! Over the last several months I have been working feverishly on a bunch of features that are not ready for prime-time yet, but are available to anyone who would like to try them out. These features are designed to make the journalling process easier while out in the field. They include: Post by email, post via text messaging, Spot GPS tracker integration, and scheduled posts.
New Feature: Maps Now Support GPS Tracks
We just launched the second phase of journal mapping features: the ability to upload and import GPS tracks to your journals. You can upload as many as you like. You can label them, change the colours, set fine-grained visibility permissions, and more...
New Feature: Powerful Security and Privacy Controls
One of the ways Outsideways excels beyond a traditional paper journal is that it has community, social, and sharing facets. We recognize however that there are often things that you would never want anyone to see or read. In order to give journallers the confidence they need to use Outsideways for storing all their data, we have released a number of security and privacy enhancements that make journals a powerful data collection and sharing platform.
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