Bikehike

[Peter]

Anyone know what's happened to bikehike?

[Wobbly]

"Firefox can't find the server at www.bikehike.co.uk"

So it's not just me then.

[shyumu]

That's a shame - it was my favourite route planning site.

[Wowbagger]

It's disappeared before and come back again. Hopefully it will return.

[Russell]

This disappearance episode looks terminal I fear.

[Bledlow]

If so, I'll have to find a new favourite route plotting site. Bugger!

[Russell]

Try Openrunner - a bit quirky (French) and I think necessary to login to use it but works OK.

[Jord]

Tragic - best plotting site out there. Loads more to choose from I suppose.

[dasmoth]

It's very sad, but after several days of downtime (and not even a DNS response at the moment) I'm inclined to concur with Russell  .

I've been worrying we might see a culling of online routing tools after the announcement about charges for the Google Maps API a few weeks back.  I notice that most of the alternative are now making it hard to do very much without registering ("no registration" was one of the reasons I liked Bikehike so much).

On the off-chance that the admin of bikehike might read this at some point: many, many thanks for running a great service over the last few years -- it'll be missed.

[Jurek]

Tragic - best plotting site out there. Loads more to choose from I suppose.

Do any of the others offer the OS facility on screen?

I have an email addy for Simon Caldwell (creator of bikehike) but it's on the same server, so going nowhere.
Does anyone have an alternative email for him?

[dasmoth]

Tragic - best plotting site out there. Loads more to choose from I suppose.

Do any of the others offer the OS facility on screen?

I'm not aware of one.  To be honest, I get the impression the OS aren't wildly eager to see the free OpenData API being used for "outdoor leisure" purposes -- they see walkers/cyclists/etc. as a group who really ought to be paying for their maps!

(That said, you can get almost all the information from the Landranger maps as part of the VectorMaps District product -- which is free to download.  The major thing that's missing is rights of way.  I have occasionally wondered just what would be involved in going round local authorities and getting this information from their definitive maps...)

[Biggsy]

It's rumoured that Google Maps will only be charging for excesses of over 25,000 hits per day: $4 per 1,000 views in excess of the limit.  If BikeHike has been that popular then I suspect they could be successful as a paid-for service.  It could be linked to your number of hits, so needn't be expensive for light users.

The days of so much good stuff being free, or purely advertising-funded, on the net are coming to an end, I fear.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15523050

[Wobbly]

BikeHike was a web site I would have been prepared to pay to use.

[Arellcat]

Sounds like good monopoly business sense to me.  Make something fantastic and wonderful available for free, leave it a few years until almost everyone depends on it, and then tax it.

BikeRouteToaster is my usual tool for plotting cycle routes before importing them into Garmin's RoadTrip, whose generic basemap is pretty much useless, and BRT uses Gugolmaps predominantly. 

[Bledlow]

BikeHike was a web site I would have been prepared to pay to use.

+1. Good enough that I'd pay a modest annual fee for it.

[Jethro]

And me.

It will be sadly missed.

[Biggsy]

If anyone knows who's behind BikeHike, how about inviting them to join this forum (if not already a member) and chat about it?  Of course they may not wish to comment if negotiations are up in the air.

[Wobbly]

If anyone knows who's behind BikeHike, how about inviting them to join this forum (if not already a member) and chat about it?  Of course they may not wish to comment if negotiations are up in the air.

WHOIS shows that the Domain is (was?) registered to Simon Caldwel but there are no contact details.

[Euan Uzami]

Is it dead for good then?

The trouble with offering it as a paid for service is that you would not only have to strike a deal with google for use of its maps, but would also have to strike a deal with OS as well if it is a paid for service.

Google would probably find a way to sew up this loophole, but could the problem not be got round by making the entire html of bikehike's course creator a downloadable app rather than served off a central site? Might be a (temporary) way of getting round the fact that it is one website "making"* all the hits.
OR even just play a cat and mouse game of splitting bikehike into a myriad of differently-named (but essentially identical) sites, with some sort of (underhand) load balancing arrangement, so that no single one 'generates' more than a certain number of hits.

*It'd be interesting to see how google define "a website generating hits" when the actual hits to google occur off the client via javascript (presumably) and don't go through bikehike's server.

It just seems a shame that one of the merits of bikehike was not just its use of google per se but what it embellished on top of that such as its simple functionality and useful algorithms.

[Hot Flatus]

Yes, I made a paypal donation after receiving some help from Simon, but I got the distinct impression he wasn't interested in it being a money-making venture.

I hope it comes back. It did everything I needed and wanted including being the only provider of gpxx files that I know of.

[Biggsy]

It could charge but still be run as a non-for-profit venture.  Perhaps someone else will duplicate the idea if Simon has lost interest.

This is still all speculation anyway.  We don't know that the site isn't down for technical or personal reasons not connected with the Google Maps issue.

I was only an occasional user of BikeHike myself (because I usually prefer unplanned rides), but I liked it when I did use it.  Its interface was nice and handy.

[Jurek]

The amount of information for planning rides that it was possible to glean from the OS maps, surpasses by far anything offered by Google.

[Biggsy]

An email address for BikeHike was/is: admin[at]bikehike[dot]co[dot]uk.

[Bledlow]

The amount of information for planning rides that it was possible to glean from the OS maps, surpasses by far anything offered by Google.

Especially if (as I often do) you want to use a cycle path, a cut-through in a road blocked for motor vehicles part-way, or one of the many other routes which Google maps don't recognise as valid.

[Jurek]

An email address for BikeHike was/is: admin[at]bikehike[dot]co[dot]uk.

Sorry, we were unable to deliver your message to the following address.

<admin@bikehike.co.uk>:
No MX or A records for bikehike.co.uk

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