Tracking Rides With Rever
Viewing my first Rever ride from my desktop computer.
I was recently introduced to a new tool that I may very well put to a lot of use on this website. Brought to us by many of the same folks responsible for Butler motorcycle maps, we now have Rever.
Rever is a ride-tracking app for your GPS-equipped cell phone. In brief, you create an account, download and install the app, and then turn it on when you go for a ride. Shut it off when you’re done with the ride and you then have, stored in the cloud, a complete record of your ride, including route, miles, time, average speed, and more. That image above shows my very first ride with Rever tracking me.
It’s dead simple plus it has a variety of uses. Offered in a freemium manner as is so common these days, the basic app is free but if you pay to subscribe it offers a lot more. But at its most basic, you can track rides and also plan rides in advance.
Once you do a tracked ride or plan out a ride, you can save it. Any friends you are connected to on Rever can see your rides. So if you’re taking a group on a ride you have done before, or that you have planned out on Rever, each of your friends can open up that ride and they have the complete route plan right there in their hand.
One issue group riders encounter at times is getting separated. If each of your riders is on Rever and is tracking, lose somebody and you can pull out your phone, go to their rides, and see where they are right now. How cool is that?
For the paid membership you can also get Butler Maps overlays on your map so you can plan the route to hit all the good roads Butler points out to you.
What really interests me about Rever is that back when I built this www.motorcyclecolorado.com website we did not have smart phones that were essentially desktop computers in your hand. But full-sized web pages don’t generally display well on a cell phone. In order to at least not get too far behind technology I have rebuilt the main pages of the site to be mobile-friendly, but that’s only 11 pages out of more than 100.
Of course, the main point of the website is to present the best rides in Colorado. I have created maps but they are static. You can’t zoom in or do anything else other than look at them. With Rever I see the opportunity to create new, mobile-friendly pages for all these routes that should really bring the site more up to date. So look for that to happen over the next couple years.
Meanwhile, in order to present all these routes via Rever maps, I’m going to have to ride them all again. Oh, what a dirty job. Please don’t throw me in that briar patch.
Biker Quote for Today
If you think I’m cute now, wait until you see me on my motorcycle.
