Note: An updated version of this tutorial is now available.

Signing up and using GPSLog Labs is really easy.

First, go to gpsloglabs.com and sign in using any OpenID account:

Depending on your OpenID provider, you may be asked to put in your name and email address to finish creating your account. Or you may just need to choose whether you want your logs shown in kilometers or miles.

Next, click the Upload Log button and choose your log file. Put in a name to identify your GPS logging device too.

The file will take a little while to upload, then a page will appear that will automatically detect the log file format.

Click the button for the format which imports the data best and the file will now appear in the Uploaded Log Files tab.

After a few seconds, the file should be processed. During this step, GPSLog Labs will identify the start and stop locations of your activity and break the file up into segments.

This will highlight any issues GPSLog Labs has had processing the file, and in particular, since this is the first log uploaded, the start and end places need to be named. Click the log file name to begin editing the extracted activity.

The log file detail page shows the contents of the log file at the top, and the extracted activity at the bottom. Activity is broken into time at the start place of the log (locking the door, waiting for the logger to lock on, stretching etc.), the time between places (the interesting bit, and the time at the end place.

Click on the first unnamed place to give it a name.

The street address and timezone will be looked up automatically. You should change the place name to something meaningful and shorter.

You can move the place marker if you need to, and change the "capture radius" for the place, but the default is usually fine. Moving the place will cause the file to be reprocessed and you'll have to click through from the Uploaded Log Files page again once it's done.

After naming the place, the activity will be updated accordingly. You may need to name other places that appear in your log as well.

The next step is to name the route. Routes are used to classify and group activity that follow the same general path.

You can also tag the activity according to it's type/purpose.

You can click on the activity thumbnail to popup a more detailed map of any segment to help identify the activity. From that popup you can also click through to the activity detail page.

Back on the Uploaded Log Files page, the log file will now show up as blue (instead of yellow) to indicate it has been edited, and the Places, Routes and Tags indicator icons on the right hand side will go green.

Your activity is also visible in the rest of the system classified by places, routes and tags.

So, give it a try yourself and let me know what you think.

Well, the inbox redesign mentioned a few weeks back turned out to take longer than planned, but the end result is a huge improvement in the way you manage your log files with GPSLog Labs and the "inbox" doesn't really exist anymore.

I'll post a quick tutorial soon to show the basic steps involved in uploading a log and processing it, but for now, a summary of some of the major changes are as follows:

• Activity is automatically extracted from uploaded log files and no longer needs to be "confirmed" before it shows up in the rest of the site.
• You get much more direct control over the editing of the extracted activity.
• Places will automatically be created based on your uploaded logs.

This last one is a biggy and results in a big change to the way you use GPSLog Labs. GPSLog Labs now "asks for forgiveness, not permission" and will create a new place whenever a log starts or stops in a location that can't be matched to an existing place. This means that you can get up and running with the site much more quickly.

When GPSLog Labs creates a place, you can either give it a name and keep it or if you don't want a place at that location, you can swap it for the correct place that should have matched.

Just a quick note to say that the first phase of the redesign of the GPSLog Labs Inbox is now live.

The tabs have been renamed and some of the less used tabs have been changed to links at the bottom of the main remaining tabs.

There'll be some more big changes soon, until then, the documentation is going to be a little out of date. Please contact me if you get stuck anywhere and need some assistance before then.

GPSLog Labs is now running off a new server. Hopefully the change over caused minimal disruption and the new server should be faster with more reliable bandwidth.

I've just changed the way that GPSLog Labs detects the local timezone for a log to make it more reliable.

Each place now has a timezone field and this is used to set the default timezone for any logs to or from that place (kind of obvious really...)

When you're adding a new place, you can choose the timezone or just click the "Auto-detect" button which will use the geonames.org web-service to determine the timezone.

I have been able to fill in most timezones for places that have been created to date. Have a look at the Places configuration page though as you may have one or two that you'll need to set yourself.

If a log doesn't match any places it will default to the timezone you've set in your Profile page, and the timezone for a log can always be edited if you want it to be something different.

This post outlines a few of the recent updates to GPSLog Labs:

• I've added a new menu to the uploaded log files in the Inbox confirmation stage. This allows you to quickly perform tasks on the uploaded log file should you need to by simply moving the mouse over the log file heading:
  
• Graphs now shade the middle two quartiles of the data, instead of showing +/- one standard deviation, where the distribution is not Gaussian. i.e. everywhere except distances along a single route. Blame Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
• There's a Battery Cycle Duration vs Date graph on the device's Battery Life Graph tab as I was curious to see if my batteries might be deteriorating with age (they're not yet.)
• There's a new Total Stop Time vs Date graph on the route detail Stops tab. This can show you if your amount of stopped or resting time is changing over time.
• Goal graphs now have a dot showing the required amount to meet your target in the remaining time. The lines show the overall average so far (blue) and the average target required (orange), the dots reflect what you need to do per week/month to meet the target based on what you've done so far and how much time you have remaining:
  
• Goals are now shown on the week's activity "dashboard" on home page. This lets you see at a glance how you're tracking against the goals and plan what to do next:
  
  This shows: the goal title, the difference between your actual activity and the goal target to date, the total activity counting towards the goal this week, a percentage comparison to the weekly target.
  Under the total goal activity for the week are coloured indicators to show what day the activity occurred on. The most recent day is on the right in green, the oldest in orange on the left.

GPSLog Labs works quite well on the iPhone, but it's not a truly useful mobile experience:

So, I've added a mobile version of the site:

It will take advantage of the GPS in the phone (if available) to show you information in GPSLog Labs that's relevant to your current location (if it can recognise it) and you can also add new places into GPSLog Labs directly from the phone while you're at the place. Meaning logs you upload later will be automatically chopped without you having to edit them.

You can quickly browse through the logs you've uploaded, view their stats, maps and graphs:

This is just the beginning, expect a lot more useful features soon (and let me know if you've got any ideas too!)

I've reorganised and simplified the tabs on GPSLog Labs, they'd been multiplying and needed to be rationalized. In case you can't find something, the following is a summary of what changed:

• The Stats tab has been combined into the Reports tab, the old Reports showing up under the Custom Reports subsection.
• Your Devices are now shown at the bottom of the home page, rather than on their own tab.
• There's an Upload button on the home page now, and no longer and Upload tab.

The home page has had a bit of a shake up too, moving the Inbox summary to the right hand panel.

There's a new Wind Effect graph on the GPSLog Labs route details Other Graphs tab.

This graph attempts to quantify the effects of wind from different directions on logs along a route. It is intended to assist you to choose a route when bike riding (either to minimise the effect of the wind or to maximise it if you're keen!)

There are 4 lines plotting the relative effect on the overall average speed for the route for different wind strengths. The units are relative and indicative only.

For example, for a log such as the following (predominantly traveling in an east-west and west-east direction):

The computed Wind Effect indicates that the greatest effect will be when the the wind is from the east or west, and the minimum when the wind is from the north or south:

For a route which has a less symmetrical profile, with long sections traveling east and south:

The computed wind effect is more even, but there is a definite advantage when the wind is coming from the west:

The wind model used is pretty primitive and assumes that a headwind has the same effect on your speed as a tailwind, but it's better than nothing. If anyone knows of any more sophisticated models that could be used, I'd be happy to look into it.

The sunrise and sunset times are now displayed in the GPSLog Labs timeline views (for a date, week or log file.)

The location of the sunrise/set is taken from the starting location of the first log of each day, so may jump around a little (as the times vary quite a bit according to your latitude and longitude.)