• GPSLog Labs now calculates "Best efforts" for your uploaded activity. This is a powerful new analysis that finds the fastest sections of an activity over standard distances and allows them to be compared easily. For example, it may find that the fastest 10km of a run was the last portion, and allow that to be compared against all other times you've run that distance or further.
  
  The times for each distance are shown on the Comparisons tab of the Activity detail page using box plots to compare them to other activity on the same route or with the same tags.

  Activity times are extrapolated if they are close to a standard distance (within about 10%).

  Best efforts replace the old "standard splits" which were locked to the start of the activity, which were similar but limited in usefulness.

• Clicking on the best effort distance will show the Best Effort Detail tab:
  

  This shows the detailed statistics for the best effort and compares it to similar efforts on other activity for the route and tags.

  There's also a map showing the segment of the log where the best effort was recorded, the fastest sections with and without stops are coloured blue and green, the whole track being shown in grey.

  

  The best effort is highlighted on the speed graphs too, in the example below, the best efforts with and without stops coincide:

  
• The computed best efforts can unfortunately often be incorrect due to bad GPS data, and while it's possible to clean up the activity using the Filters, it is also possible to solve this problem by giving the system an indication of a more reasonable maximum speed for the best effort.

  Click the"Recompute best effort" button on the detail page for the incorrect best effort:

  
  This will recompute the best effort for this activity, but will ignore any potential best efforts that are above the speed indicated as reasonable. By lowering the speed you should be able to find a best effort that ignores sections which are "corrupted" due to bad GPS data.
• Best efforts are summarised for tags and routes, allowing you to find your fastest times over given distances:
  
• Best efforts can be visualised for a route too, to give an indication of where the sections you go fastest are:
  
  The altitude profile of the route is superimposed over a chart indicating the locations of the recorded best efforts at each distance for activity on the route.
• The Activity Filters editing page has been improved for filters that discard a lot of points so they are now displayed without slowing down the page unnecessarily.
• Waypoints have been added to time/manual discard filter in addition to the position filter. This makes it possible to quickly and easily select a section of an activity where the GPS signal is bad and replace it with a more accurate representation of the track.
• The little clock thumbnails now have an indication of a.m. and p.m. to help identify activity at a glance:
  
  Times are indicated as "a.m." with a thicker line going from the end time to noon.
  
  Times are indicated as "p.m." with the thicker line going from noon to the start time.
• On the Organise Places page, there is a Network tab that shows a neat visualisation of your activity between the places you have created:
  

GPSLog Labs' Position Filter now has a new "tunnel mode" that interpolates along a custom path instead of a straight line so resulting distances and speeds are more accurate.

This is easiest to illustrate with an example: A route I regularly run goes under a raised freeway for about 500m. Throughout this section, the GPS signal is unreliable and the following map shows the kind of quality of track I can expect:

Picking one of these logs in particular shows that it's probably got the wrong distance and the speeds will be way off too, not very useful.

So, to fix this up, click on Filters in the right-hand side panel of the activity detail page:

Then add a filter:

And choose the Position filter:

First you'll need to position the "discard" circle over the area of the track you wish to delete.

By default, the discarded point from your track will be replaced with a straight line through the circle. This is likely to result in an incorrect overall distance being calculated for your track (i.e. it'll be too short and the average speed will be to low too.)

To add a line of waypoints to interpolate the track through, click the Add Waypoints button then click on the map to draw the new path through the area.

Double-click to stop drawing the line, and drag the points to edit them, clicking a point will delete it.

Once the filter is saved and the edit page reloaded, the discarded points will be shown as small markers.

The following graph shows how the new track is interpolated through the waypoints at a constant speed, so stopped time will be counted in your average speed.

And back on the activity detail page, there's a nice cleaned up track that shows where I actually went, much better!

Like other filters, the Position filter can be saved to a tag so it will automatically be applied for any appropriate activity passing through that noisy signal area, meaning you'll never have to deal with messed up GPS data again.

There have been plenty of little updates to GPSLog Labs over the past few months, I've just been slack documenting them. There are also two bigger updates I'll put in separate posts (soon I hope!)

• You can now download your logs in GPX format (can't believe that wasn't in there already), which means you can take advantage of GPSLog Lab's advanced editing and filtering capabilities and then export the cleaned up data for use in other sites or loading maps back onto your device.
• The edit processed activity page has been rearranged, with the"activity" column moved to left of the table to make editing actions more obvious.

  Also, the mark as done button is now more useful since predictions are doing tagging/route assignment automatically, so has been moved to the top of the page.

  
• The side panel of activity detail page has been cleaned up and made easier to understand, hopefully it's clearer now how to get to the route page and how to select different routes.
  
• The activity detail page now uses the same route/tag selection popups as the edit log file activity page, as does the manual entry detail page. These include better filtering and suggestions than the old versions.
  
  
• Added estimated distribution curves to place session durations, place and tag days between logs graphs. These are really just a guess to make it look pretty, and assume that it's a Gaussian or Poisson distribution which is doubtful!
  
  
• Added first/last activity dates to tag summary table
• Added speed/pace distribution box whisker plots to tag summary, route detail splits tab, and activity detail splits table.
  
• Added box whisker of current battery cycle vs history to home page device list, this will give you a much clearer idea of how much time is remaining than a simple average.
  
• The checkpoint edit page now has a link to load data from logs using the route so the checkpoint can be placed accurately.
  
• I've made some changes to the upload processing that will hopefully make it better at handling large input files. As always though, the memory available on the server is limited, so the site will always struggle if you're uploading files with many days worth of data in them. For best results, I suggest using GPSBabel to chop your file into smaller pieces before uploading it.

Checkpoints are a powerful GPSLog Labsfeature for analysing your activity, they can:

• Split activity into segments for comparison, without affecting the other statistics such as overall mileage and duration.
  This would not be the case if additional places were created as extra activity records would be created.
• Compare your performance on a segment (such as a hill climb) for different routes.
• Checkpoints are assigned on a route by route basis so they only cut the activity of interest.

The easiest way to explain how checkpoints work is to run though a few examples: Once you've uploaded some activity to GPSLog Labs, you next need to assign a route to the activity. Once that's done, you can go to the Splits tab of the route detail page and click the Add Checkpoint link.

Then, create a new checkpoint by clicking on a point on the map or a stop on the log file.

Checkpoints work just like places. The activity inside the circle will be ignored, and the circle has to be big enough for all the logs to pass through it, otherwise they won't be recognised.

After saving checkpoints at the beginning and end of the climbs, the route map now looks like this:

On the route detail Splits tab, a summary of the splits is displayed.

You may need to click the "Regenerate Splits" button, which will reprocess all the activity with the new checkpoints. This may take some time, so there's an equivalent button on the activity detail page's Splits tab that will reprocess only a single activity.

Clicking on the From or To checkpoint will bring up the split detail page. This page combines activity in both directions along the segment and lets you see maps, altitude profiles, trend graphs and other stats.

Checkpoints can be used to analyse short segments too, such as laps around an oval, or runs up and down a mountain (skiing or mountain biking, for example.)

Another use is chopping off the ragged ends of a run, like in the following example where, when entering the city, the GPS signal becomes unreliable. By adding a checkpoint at the end of the path I can avoid the messy log file and also the disruption to my times caused by traffic lights and pedestrians.

This is a tricky area of the site to describe, but it's really useful, so have a play with it and if you have any questions, please let me know.

A few little enhancements to GPSLog Labs that have been made lately:

• Many graphs now have a "View full-screen" link like the maps. This will let you really zoom into the details!
• A few pages on the site now take advantage of wider screens if you have one.
• Standard splits displayed on the log detail Comparisons tab now show extrapolated times if they're a little short (within 10% of the split distance). This is handy if you've got a route that's pretty close to a standard distance and you'd like to see how it compares to other routes.
  The rank of the activity is displayed in the comparison table too, and the standard split times are now also displayed on the distance finish time predictions graph.
• Uploaded log files can now be deleted in bulk from the device log files page. This is handy if you're logging via an iPhone app and extra files are included in the zip files you email.
• The trend graphs (for Tags, Goals, Routes) have a line of best fit added, as well as displaying the overall average.
• The Distance vs Time graphs on the Tag and Goal detail pages have a new Group by tags option in addition to the group by route and age options.
• The map showing all GPSLog Labs users' places now clusters icons together and shows how many places have been added in each region.
• The remaining battery life for your device warning on the home page now gives a range in it's estimation of how much time is left.

The GPSLog Labs server will be down for maintenance on Saturday 24th September, from approximately 0:00 UTC to 8:00 UTC.

The site will be unavailable while this occurs, sorry for any inconvenience that may cause.

[Update: The server upgrade has been completed successfully.]

Updates to GPSLog Labs have been trickling in slowly over the last few months, so it's about time I mentioned a few of them on the blog:

• Maps now have a "View full-screen" link at the bottom left:
  
  This will expand the map so it fills the browser window:
  
• Buddy icons (displayed on your shared log detail pages) will now use the Gravatar for the email address you've set in your Account Settings. You can still upload an icon if you'd prefer not to use Gravatars.
  
• Fancy, searchable dropdown lists (courtesy of the Chosen library):
  
  
• "Remove automatic edits" command: Auto-chopping logs is one of GPSLog Labs' most powerful features, but sometimes you just want the entire log file. This command lets you remove all the cuts & places quickly and easily, so now you can have the best of both worlds.
  
• Deleting tasks from a goal can now be done in bulk. This makes it much easier to customise a training program or edit tasks you've cloned from another goal.
  
• The Distance Finish Time Predictions graph now shows the values at the mouse position.
• The Cumulative Stop Time vs Distance graph shows the total stopped time when zooming to a selection.
• Added sorting to the Goal task possible route selection table and fixed a few bugs with highlighting routes with appropriate distances.

A few little changes to note while I'm busy working on something big and pretty cool:

• The minimum split time between checkpoints on a route has been changed from 5 minutes to 1 minute, so you can now record splits as short as laps around an oval, assuming you're not too fast that is.
• Distances and times are now displayed with full precision in the splits detail table.
• The mobile page now has a "Recent Uploads" list, so you can check them quickly when uploading from a phone.
• Route "average" distances are now only shown if the logs are similar in length, otherwise the range of distances is displayed.
• I've added columns showing the last logged date and scheduled count for routes when selecting them for goal tasks.
• The next scheduled task for a goal is displayed in the goals table and on the summary page for quick reference.
• The goal tasks graph now has a link to zoom it in to a view of this week.

I've just added a really useful feature to GPSLog Labs: The "Comparisons" tab for an activity page now actually shows some useful comparisons in a "dashboard" format.

For each of the "standard split" distances (5 km, 5 miles, 10 km, etc.) the speed/pace and time for this log are displayed and compared to that for the other activity on the same route and/or sharing the same tags using a box plot.

The above screenshot shows the speeds for that particular run using solid dots on the box plot, and indicates it was the fastest for that route when stops are removed, but that there was a long stop somewhere between the 8 and 10 km splits that made it the slowest over those distances (the smallest value is on the left of the graphs, so rightmost is best for speed and leftmost is best for pace.)

Comparing it to all the activity tagged with Run, not just along that particular route shows it was in the top 25% (after taking out the stop):

The route comparison shows two extra splits that are not available when comparing to the tag, the total distance (10.6 km in this case) and the half-way point (5.3 km). These assume that all activity on the route is about the same length, so aren't meaningful for a tag and may also not be very useful if you have a route which varies a lot in length.

Some other recent updates to the site:

• Pages with many tabs will have some of the tabs hidden to save space. Click the "more >>" button to show the rest.
  
  
• The unknown routes page now lets you filter by tag.
• When setting up a task for a goal, you can now filter the possible routes by place. This means that you can quickly find a route of the desired distance to complete the task and aren't overwhelmed by routes from places you don't need.
• There are a couple of QR Codes on the site now to help get the urls into your mobile device. Scan the following QR code to go to the mobile version of GPSLog Labs, for example.
  
  There is also a QR code for the unique upload email address for your device on it's detail page.
• When adding tasks from a training program to a goal, or creating a new goal from a training program, you can now see a preview graph of the tasks involved:
  
• The tag detail page has a new Splits Graph tab that shows a graph of all the activity speeds/times at standard split distances, together with lines indicating the distribution (10th, 50th, 90th percentiles).
  
• The standard split distances now extend from 50km to 300km (50mi to 200mi) to make them more useful to cyclists and longer distance activities.

As always, please send feedback and suggestions to feedback forum.

GPSLog Labs now has support for manually entering data that has not been recorded via a GPS data logger. Some instances where this is appropriate are:

• Your logger failed to record the data properly (flat battery, corrupted file, operator error...)
• You were indoors on a treadmill or wind trainer or doing an activity such as swimming which can't be logged.
• You have training data that pre-dates your GPS logger.

In these, and other circumstances, GPSLog Labs will now let you enter in the basic stats about your activity (date, time, duration, distance, ...) and will then display the activity throughout the rest of the site together with other activity recorded using your GPS logger. This activity will be counted towards your Goals and Reports too, but obviously it won't be shown on maps or as Speed vs Distance graphs and the like, but where it's possible it will be included. The idea is to let you enter the kind of stats you get from a bicycle computer, stop watch or exercise equipment, but not to synthesize a GPS log.

You'll find a new Manual entries section under the Uploads tab:

The Add manual entry form allows you to enter in all the basic stats for your activity:

Once you select the start and stop places, you can choose a Route between those places or add a new one if you want:

Click on the time of the manual entry if you need to make changes after you've added it (or to delete it):

The detail page is simpler than for activity recorded with a GPS logger as there is no map or graphs to display:

The manually entered activity will show up in the rest of the site where it makes sense:

To avoid stats that you don't know from ruining your totals and averages, leave them blank, don't enter 0 (zero).

Please let me know of any suggestions for improvement at the Feedback page.