My scrapbook of cycling incidents.

July 11, 2012 8:18 AM

Help me document my weight loss and cycling journey on the great interwebz.

Early this year I decided to give cycling a try to help with weight loss and feel in love with sweating on the wheels of steel again. Now that I'm starting to train seriously for a metric century ride this fall I'd like to use a quirky domain name and web hosting I recently purchased to document all of my training and weight loss.

What are some ways that I can document the following without having to setup PHP/MySQL forms and pages:

- Miles ridden and maps of rides (I use Strava)
- Twitter feed
- LoseIt! or other food tracking application
- Workouts (I do weight training 3-4 times a week)
- Photos

Ideally I'd use my phone to do all of the documentation (i.e. weight ins, tweets, Strava) and have the site be a repository for the entire process. I've seen some of the cool things people have done with the Strava API but I'm not sure where to start on integrating everything I want to document.

Just in the spirit of full disclosure: I've lost over 50lbs in the past year but am still a VERY heavy rider (402lbs this morning) and would really like for this site to be a way for me to look back in a year and say "wow, what an adventure". Since I'm sure someone will ask - I currently ride a Surly Cross Check with super heavy duty wheels (Phil Wood 48h hubs and Velocity Chukkar rims) and will be riding at least 100 miles each week for the next two months when I bump it up to 150 miles a week.

posted by playertobenamedlater to health & fitness (5 answers total)

FitDay is pretty nifty, and they have a mobile app.

You sound like you're really motivated! Cool Beans!

I'm excited if I can get up early to walk on the treadmill!
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 8:22 AM on July 11, 2012

Training Peaks will do this, but on its own site, not yours. If your hosting service provides a WordPress installation, you might take a look at the available WordPress plugins to see whether there's something there that would meet your needs. Someone may already have done the coding for you.

Congratulations on getting into cycling! Lots of us come for the weight loss and stay for the fun. I hope you'll join our ranks!

If your goal is just to track things for yourself, then you might rethink whether you need your own hosting and domain. You can do that with one of the many fitness tracking sites out there, or even offline on your own PC. If you want to document things for the rest of the world, then I'd suggest not simply aggregating data. You need to tell a story. Otherwise people won't read what you write. Scott Cutshall, the "Large Fella on a Bike," had a knack for telling his story in an engaging way, which is why people kept coming back to his blog.
posted by brianogilvie at 8:43 AM on July 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

I documented a bike tour a couple years ago. My setup was based on a self-hosted Wordpress blog with some plugins. One that created new posts from tweets (Twitter Tools—kind of a PITA to set up, but it works), one that created new posts from flickr uploads (I actually forget how I did this—I think if I were doing this now, I'd use ifttt.com, which could also work for posting tweets to the blog), and one that produced a map and stats based on a gpx file (XML Google Maps).

I was using a different cycling app (Cyclemeter). It would send me an e-mail at the end of each ride with a URL for the ride's KML file (the file was hosted by the Cyclemeter people in this case—it was also possible to download the file itself, but for my purposes, using a URL to a file already online worked better, because I was doing everything through an iPhone). I'd paste that URL into a new post, which would generate the map and ride stats via XML Google Maps.
posted by adamrice at 8:45 AM on July 11, 2012

If you eventually get your weigh in data into a Google Spreadsheet Doc, you can use their tools to publish charts and graphs that you can embed into the pages on your site.
posted by mmascolino at 11:26 AM on July 11, 2012

Thanks for all of the advice! I've been meaning to check out Cyclemeter for a while.
posted by playertobenamedlater at 11:58 AM on July 11, 2012