Soft launch

[Anthony]

www.miletrak.com

It's not quite complete and it's not yet perfect, but I wanted to put the old excuse for an application out of its misery. MileTrak 1.0 (Beta) is in production status and you can all access your data under your previous user ID/password.

I am aware of the bugs and outstanding issues, thanks to the wonderful Beta testers who gave the site a whirl over the past couple weeks.

Version 1.0 introduces the all new pathfinding engine, MileTrak Express. This feature gives you mileage and routing data between any two Amtrak train stations. MileTrak Express alone required several hundred hours of development time, but I'd say it was worth it! The engine will receive small modifications over the next few months as time allows.

The thirteen temperamental months of MileTrak development proved to be a long, rocky road, but it's all mostly done and I am very glad. There are so many new and exciting projects staring me in the face, taunting me, saying "Put MileTrak down! Work on me!", and now it's time to appease their cries. In a perfect world, MileTrak would be completely polished upon its release, but with work, school, and all of my development projects, there are simply not enough hours in the day for perfection. :unsure:

While considering all of the above... praise, criticism, and comments are all welcomed and appreciated. Please post them in this thread as replies, so that they're all in one place.

Thank you!

 

[Anthony]

If you want your "Amtrak Miles" count on the left under your post count, please reply here or send me a PM until I add a way to set that up automatically through your forum Control Panel.

 

[Amfleet]

I guess my main four questions/concerns are:

1. How come when I select a route all some 500 stations still show up in the slection box? Could you make so only the stations that that route serves are shown?

2. It would be nice to have discontinued routes such as the Pioneer, Desert Wind, Northeast Direct, etc. I do understand there is a limit to how far you can go back otherwise the number of discontinued routes would out number the avalible routes of today. Possibly limit it to 1990-present?

3. On the main page where one can view others trip mileage, I have been unable to click on and view my own. I have my options set to allow others to view my trips, but for some reason I cant view my own?

4. In the date selection box it wont allow me just to put a year, but the whole date. Their are some trips I took back in the day where I can only remember the year, but not the actual date of travel. Is there a way just to add the year, but not the month or day?

Otherwise its a great set up. Thanks for all your time and effort.

 

[Viewliner]

I agree, my only problems, are the fact you can't set default as to which order you view your trips, and the Comment editing (which you said will be done later).

Thanks. B)

 

[Anthony]

1. How come when I select a route all some 500 stations still show up in the slection box? Could you make so only the stations that that route serves are shown?

When you select the route, I'd have to have something running in the browser to immediately eliminate all the cities that don't run on the route you just picked. Otherwise, it would have to reload the entire page. I've thought about this and it just doesn't seem quite as easy as it sounds.

2. It would be nice to have discontinued routes such as the Pioneer, Desert Wind, Northeast Direct, etc. I do understand there is a limit to how far you can go back otherwise the number of discontinued routes would out number the avalible routes of today. Possibly limit it to 1990-present?

This is definitely on the list of "to-do", starting with the Desert Wind and Pioneer.

3. On the main page where one can view others trip mileage, I have been unable to click on and view my own. I have my options set to allow others to view my trips, but for some reason I cant view my own?

This is a bug in most web browsers, and I'll need to correct MileTrak to compensate. The fact is that your MileTrak user name is capitalized, and so the system only knows of your account with the capital "A" in "Amfleet", but when you click the link "Amfleet.users.miletrak.com", your browser makes it all lower-case, therefore the system sees "amfleet" and thus doesn't recognize it. I will need to correct this soon. In the meantime, you can go to:

http://miletrak.com/miletrak.php?user=Amfleet

with the capital "A". Maybe I should make this change to everything, so that the links at least work for right now?

4. In the date selection box it wont allow me just to put a year, but the whole date. Their are some trips I took back in the day where I can only remember the year, but not the actual date of travel. Is there a way just to add the year, but not the month or day?

A good idea, for now you might leave the date blank, or just put a fake day like the 1st or fake month and day like 1/1. That way you'll recognize which dates aren't "real"... ?

 

[Anthony]

I agree, my only problems, are the fact you can't set default as to which order you view your trips, and the Comment editing (which you said will be done later).

The default sorting is also on the "to-do" list. It's actually half done - I was going to complete it but didn't have time before release day.

 

[AlanB]

1. How come when I select a route all some 500 stations still show up in the slection box? Could you make so only the stations that that route serves are shown?

When you select the route, I'd have to have something running in the browser to immediately eliminate all the cities that don't run on the route you just picked. Otherwise, it would have to reload the entire page. I've thought about this and it just doesn't seem quite as easy as it sounds.

While I'm not quite sure just how easy it is to do this, reloading the page is not unheard of. Many sites do exactly that, especially major hotel chains and the like.

Yes it may take an extra minute for the second drop down to load, but I think that most people are used to this idea now. Since I suspect that something like this could be a rather big change, maybe this is an improvement for the next major overhaul of MileTrak. :lol:

 

[Amfleet]

1. How come when I select a route all some 500 stations still show up in the slection box? Could you make so only the stations that that route serves are shown?

When you select the route, I'd have to have something running in the browser to immediately eliminate all the cities that don't run on the route you just picked. Otherwise, it would have to reload the entire page. I've thought about this and it just doesn't seem quite as easy as it sounds.

While I'm not quite sure just how easy it is to do this, reloading the page is not unheard of. Many sites do exactly that, especially major hotel chains and the like.

Yes it may take an extra minute for the second drop down to load, but I think that most people are used to this idea now. Since I suspect that something like this could be a rather big change, maybe this is an improvement for the next major overhaul of MileTrak. :lol:

Yes, I've seen this done on some airline websites. There will be two columns that list all the cities the airline flies in and out of. When you choose a city in the first column, the page will reload so the second column only displays the cities that you can fly to from the first column city. Hope that makes sense. Now, though it may be a nice feature for us, I'm not sure what has to be done on your part to make that happen. I much rather see discontinued routes added first though.

 

[Anthony]

3. On the main page where one can view others trip mileage, I have been unable to click on and view my own. I have my options set to allow others to view my trips, but for some reason I cant view my own?

Fixed this last night.