Jeff Ballweg

I thought it about time to get a personal website going which I could use to experiment and test out some ideas I’ve got. It’s till pretty rough, but here’s a description of what I’ve got.

This page has a WordPress powered blog. I whipped up a WordPress theme last night, and its starting to come together nicely. There’s still work to do on sidebar and search, but its coming together.

Design and Project pages are still blank, so you’ll get a 404 if you try to go there.

The Bike tab has a crazyguyonabike rss feed from a guy we keep an eye on. In the future we’ll write our own and put it here.

On the right half of that page you’ll find an app I’m working on. I’m calling it GeoBike, for lack of inspiration in the naming department. As we bike around we post our location to the app. Currently we can post directly via the web or by SMS-text message. A third method, where my Blackberry uses it’s GPS to send a location to the server periodically is also in the works.

The bike page shows you our last known location, and gives you some information on the conditions there.

The weather info is provided by NOAA‘s, and the elevation is provided by USGS National Elevation Dataset.

On the Run tab I’m building a mileage logging app. Anyone who has run any significant distance finds themselves attempting to analyze their own performance. Hills, weather, shoes, traffic lights, clothing and time of day all seem to have an effect on your speed.
Of course, there are lots of running logs out there, but most of them require me to input lots of data after each run. I feel that much of this can be left to the application itself.
For example, if I enter that I ran for two hours, and the app would needs to know what time I started, it should at least start by figuring that I started about two hours ago. Also, if the app knows what time I started, why ask the weather conditions at that time, as weather information is all readily available on the internet.

Also, I find that most runners have a mental catalog of routes, in various mileages, with various features such as hills, lack of hills, or some that are better at night, or if it’s windy, etc. I’d like to map my courses once, and be able to select from them in the future. I want to compare my times on that course, and how they compare to other courses.

Of course, like everthing on this website, it’s Under Construction.

That is to say, if you enter a piece of data, save a route, or log a comment, I’m sorry to say it may very well disappear later as things evolve.