Athlo Blog

The Athlo team recently put some effort into improving the look and feel of the Blog.  We think it is a huge improvement from our original version.  The changes are pretty obvious.

The Athlo blog is built on a WordPress framework.  The original blog theme and look were a standard template provided by Wordpress.  There is a large number of templates to choose from and it is extremely easy to change from one to another, even for a non-technical person.  Customizing the sidebar with built in widgets is also a snap for the non-technical person.

Creating a custom header, menu bar, and some of the side bar changes required a basic understanding of .CSS and the inner workings of a WordPress site.  The learning curve is short and a site like CSS Basics is a great place to get started.  As always, let us know what you think of the new look or if you have ideas for other changes.

The Athlo development team is hard at work improving the way you get feedback when you generate training plans.  We feel confident that the plans we are generating for you are good plans, but sometimes convincing you of that is harder than you might think.  To better communicate the output of our training algorithms, we’re trying to think of good, yet simple ways to let you know what we’re giving you.  For example, consider this new chart for marathon training plans:

There is a lot going on in a training plan: weekly cycles, multiple phases, rest plan consideration, workouts per week, etc.  We’ve taken a few shots at what we think works, but we’d love to know what’s important to you.  How do you look at a plan to tell if you like it?  Do you want all the details?  Are you looking for trends?  Do you compare to other data?  Let us know what you need when you look at our dynamic (and free) plans and we’ll do our best to accomidate.

In more subtle news, we’ve been busy tweaking the front end to give you a little more pleasant user experience.  MSIE 6 users should notice an incredibly better and more functional interface on the calendar page.  All users will find friend summaries now on their home page as well as quick links to see what’s hot on the blog.  Another simple but nice feature we’ve added is the ability to copy your friends calendar entries.  Simply view their calendar, click on an event, and one-click will add it to your calendar.

We’ve got a lot of momentum going right now on the development team.  We’re excited about what’s coming in the weeks ahead.  Keep hitting refresh and we’ll keep writing code!

We’ve done some serious house cleaning on the personalized home pages.  The biggest and most obvious change is the addition of the “What’s New” column that documents what the people in your network are up to.  Each day, your active friends will show up in this column with snippets about what they’re up to and links to more detailed information.  For now it only shows when people log workouts and add friends, but over the next week we’ll add several more types of logs to keep you informed with who’s doing what.

A more subtle enhancement is the friends page.  We’ve added tabs to let you quickly view all of your friends, who’s active, who’s local, and who hasn’t accepted your friend request yet.  Moreover, we’ve added some nice controls to make it easy for you to expand the friend boxes and get more information.

We hope you like the changes.  As always, send us any feedback you may have.  For you MSIE 6 users, we know there are some quirks when viewing the page with that browser.  They are at the top of our list now and we hope to roll out patches in the next few days.

Athlo has a new, clean style that we think helps to bring key content to the forefront while at the same time being unobtrusive.  First, we’ve added subtle tabs to the top of the site.  When you’re on pages like your profile, the corresponding tab will be shaded to make it more obvious where you are on the site.  For those of you forced to use MS Internet Explorer 6, we’ve accounted for many of that browser’s shortcomings that may have resulted in a less-than-optimal viewing experience (we recommend Firefox).  We’ve also made a lot of subtle tweaks that probably aren’t worth mentioning here, but our loyal users are certain to notice and appreciate.  We’ve employed the help of Athlonian and graphic design expert Jahmai Smith to help us work on color schemes and site imagery going forward.  So while this style change is a refreshing update, it’s only the beginning!

Shifting gears to information, a question we get a lot is, “what is Athlo?”  Well, we’ve added the facilities to help answer that question on the site.  The Athlo site tour is a clean series of pages that help to highlight what Athlo is all about and why it’s a step ahead of the competition.  So the next time you’re telling a friend about Athlo, send them to our tour page and let them see first hand what Athlo brings to the table.

We made some tweaks to the way we think about dates and times on the site.  Athlo is now aware of time zones.  Let’s say you live in San Francisco and log a run at 6pm.  Your friend in New York checks your recent activities at 9:15pm his time.  What does he see?  9:15pm - 6pm = you ran 3hrs 15mins ago, or does it? In reality, 6pm your time is 9pm his time and you ran only 15 minutes ago.  If your brain is hurting because of the time zone math, don’t worry, we’ve taken care of it.  Athlo now knows about your friends around the world.  When Switzerland resident and Athlo user Sarah Apgar logs a workout and 15 minutes transpire, everyone will see 15 minutes ago when they view her profile regardless of their time zone.  Check your settings page to ensure your time zone is properly set.

Some of you told us that you felt the drag/drop calendar interface was lacking because there was no trash can to drag workouts to in order to delete them.  In the bottom right of the calendar we’ve added just that.  Simply drag any workout that’s on your calendar that you don’t want to the trash and it’ll be deleted. We think it’s one of those tiny additions that make the site much easier to use.

We’ve made several other back end changes like enhanced page caching to speed up page load times, but we’ll spare you the geeky details.  Just know that we’re continuing to clean up and enhance some of the existing features on the site in parallel with the development of new features.  As always, your input is valueable so let us know what you’re thinking in the comments.

We posted a few site updates over the weekend that we’d like to briefly point out as we think they make the overall site experience much cleaner.  First, we’ve added a home page for every user.  Once you’ve logged in, clicking the Athlo logo or your name will take you to your home page.  This page’s purpose is to provide you insight into the activities of your friends.  You’ll find who’s been active, who’s been on the site, and most importantly who hasn’t logged any recent workouts and is potentially getting lazy.  We’re hoping all of these things plus the features in our pipeline will help you to motivate yourself and others.

On the profile page, you’ll find a much cleaner interface for uploading images and setting your profile picture.  While not an ultra-critical feature, we’re taking the time now to make nice some of the features we slapped together early on while focused on other training features.

Lastly, we’ve added a lot more links to connect you to your friends’ profiles and training calendars throughout the site.  On your profile and training page you’ll find links to your most active friends, and on your friends pages you’ll find a new sub-menu that will allow you to easily jump between their profile and training pages.  Seeing what your friends are doing is much easier as a result.

We’ll be rolling out some more interface enhancements this week so keep checking back and poking around.

We have finally made public one of the features we’re most excited about: training plan generation.  Based on scientific data and their own training experience, Ryan and John supplied me with tons of information pertaining to how people run, what their capacities are, and how to train differently given various constraints.  I automated their logic and today we have launched the first release of the marathon training plan generator.  Here’s how it works:

You start off by telling Athlo everything you know about your current fitness level.  If you don’t know anything, no worries, Athlo will make a good guess.  For the marathon training plan, you provide your known times for shorter distances, like a 5K or 10K.  Using data like this, Athlo will immediately generate a semi-generic training plan that you’re free to customize by providing additional input.

For example, Athlo will likely assume a 20-week plan for a marathon, but maybe you don’t have that long or would like to take longer.  Just change the dates and Athlo will adjust your schedule.  The same is true for you start/end fitness level.  If you know your body better than Athlo, simply override the assumptions it’s made and continue.

You finish up the process by telling Athlo what days of the week you can/can’t work out.  By doing this, Athlo will schedule your workouts on days that work for you.  Moreover, given your goal, Athlo will make a recommendation for how many days a week you should train.  Again, if your thoughts vary from Athlo’s, so be it.  Our simple drag-drop interface will let you make changes in seconds.

Lastly, you have the option to print your training plan or save it to your profile.  We recommend the latter simply because you can then track your performance on Athlo and better assess whether or not your goal is realistic.  If it’s not, update it and keep training!

In developing this feature we tried to make a complex process simple.  Compare our generator to others on the net and we think you’ll quickly see the difference.  Others force you into a X-week schedule, require too many inputs, and give you a plan that you can’t tweak once you’ve generated it.  We think we’ve raised the bar with ours.  Of course with any new feature there are bound to be bugs and interfaces that need tweaking.  Please help Athlo get better by providing your input in the comments.  Your comments will help ensure that as we update this feature and roll out new distances and sports, we best meet your needs.  Enjoy!

We posted some significant, yet seamless, updates to the form that allows you to add new workouts.  Now when you add a workout, you have a few new options:

1. Add exercises.  This is a significant enhancement that let’s you add multiple exercises to a single workout.  For example, if you’re workout consists of a warm-up, run, and cool-down, then log these as three separate exercises within the same workout.  Each exercise has a set of relevant quantifiers that let you track things like your pace, time, distance, etc.  In time, these quantifiers will be the basis of a great deal of insight into your performance.
2. Auto-save.  Never worry about clicking that save button again.  As you type in the workout/exercise form, your data is saved automatically.  Just open, edit, and close … one less step.  That’s how we try to approach most everything on the site: clean and simple.
3. Add notes, or not.  In every workout there is an “add notes” link.  If you have some extra text you’d like to add to your workout, this is the place for it.  If not, it remains hidden out of sight for a cleaner form.
4. Start Time of Day.  There is no requirement to use this when creating workouts, however it will be an important feature when group workout scheduling goes live.  We’re scaling the site for bigger and better things so be sure to check back time and again for what Athlo can do for your athletic lifestyle.

In other news, we’ve been working hard on getting one of the exciting features ready to lauch: training plan generation.  We’ll keep you posted on the development, but so far it’s coming together quite nicely.

We’ve taken the announcements section off of the homepage and decided to create a blog to let everyone know what is going on in the Athlo world. We will be able to go into more detail about features and research this way. We look forward to getting feedback in the comments.

We are using really convenient WordPress blog software in order to focus our time on developing the website. We will be releasing some upgrades to the training calendar that will allow you to log your workout details soon. As we add more sports to choose from, you will also be able to log workout details for them.

Stay tuned for some more upcoming features being released soon.

Athlo has reached a major milestone in the site’s feature development. The training calendar is now live and the link can be found in your main title bar after logging in. Simply click on “training” and you will be able to view your calendar. It will become the foundation for training at Athlo and keeping you on the path to achieving your goals.

The calendar is simple, yet highly functional and easy to use. The drag and drop feature makes creating new workouts, saving workouts and creating your own training plan fast and easy. Give us your feedback and let us know what you think.

We have also added an RSS feed to make it easier for you to keep up with the latest developments and announcements on Athlo. Subscribe to ensure that you’re immediately notified of new features as we roll them out.

Athlo has many more great things coming up. The training calendar will tie together many of the features we have planned over the next few weeks so check back often to see what’s available.