A feed for sports and outdoors activities

02 Aug 2022

Strava is a popular tool for sharing sports and outdoors activities, and has become the de facto social medium for athletes, runners, cyclists etc. I'm not the kind of person who likes to share every detail about how I train or my daily activities, but sometimes I enjoy sharing a workout, race or a route I've done in the mountains. I also enjoy keeping control of my own data and how it is accessed and displayed, and I have only reluctantly used Strava and Garmin Connect to share activities.

While I'm waiting for someone to make an ActivityPub-enabled Strava-clone, I made my own Activities-feed on this website. To add an activity, I upload a gpx-file containing the GPS-track (including elevation data and timestamps), and optionally add a textfile with a description and images from the activity. The feed uses Leaflet and leaflet-evelation.js to display gpx-files on map tiles, and plot the elevation profile and speed graph. I have chosen to use map tiles from OpenTopoMap, since it's important for me to have detailed terrain information when visualizing the activities. My very messy build-script for this website takes care of putting the text description and images in the correct places.

This way I can easily share workouts and activities with friends and family. The activities also show up in my RSS-feed. The feed is not very visually pleasing yet, but I will probably fine-tune to CSS to make it look a bit more clean.

Check out the new feed at this link!