Oct
24
2009

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Database Live

by Tyler

We started this trip by simply recording our GPS coordinates every night and maintaining a budget in excel. Over the last six months we've added all sorts of features to our website that we didn't originally plan for: saving our daily gps tracks, linking photos and journals to our map markers, publishing our exact route with elevation profiles, accepting donations, etc.

It has been apparent to me for a few months now that the wealth of information we have been collecting could also provide valuable planning assistance for other world-cycle-tourers-to-be. When organizing our trip, for example, we would have loved to know the actual daily costs incurred by other cycle tourers to help with our saving and budgeting goals. A lot of information is out there but none of it is incredibly easy to sift through. Until recently, our data wasn't much better.

Enter the new link which is shown in the upper right corner of both our journal and our website: "behind the scenes". For the last week Tara and I have been working to compile all of the data we've tracked so far into a publicly accessible database. Thankfully, this is essentially what my day job is; I had all of the requisite tools ready at hand. Even more thankfully, tracking everything is now a breeze (almost all of it happens automatically)!

Soon we will be able to use the information in our database to provide a pretty clear picture of what it takes (financially via our expenses, physically via our daily routes/elevation profiles, emotionally via our journals) to do a world tour by bicycle. Until we actually link all of this information to our website via a pretty interface, you can poke around the raw data by clicking the "behind the scenes" link at the top of the page!

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5 comments

How great is it to enter a database that I am already comfortable using! Very cool guys. Maybe you can sell different levels of user access!?
Posted by Sandra Brakstad on October 24th, 2009 at 8:33 PM
Tyler,

That is absolutely Nuts! I thought I was organized. You have taken it to another level...I am blown away!

Dad
Posted by Tony on October 24th, 2009 at 11:27 PM
@Tyler: Here you will find some statistics (Friedel & Andrew)just to compare with yours. Figures will change more you move south; Europe is pretty expensive.
http://travellingtwo.com/1716
Yves
Posted by Matz on October 25th, 2009 at 3:49 AM
Any thoughts about releasing a version for others to use (pay or otherwise?) That would certainly make it a lot easier for others without the requisite programming knowledge to output the same sort of data.

A suggestion for your expenses would be to put the costs in USD based on that day's exchange rate.
Posted by mdev on October 26th, 2009 at 2:44 AM
Sandra--

Glad you like it! We definitely won't be charging for access to our daily statistics :p

Dad--

Wait until you see all the nifty little statistics it'll automatically generate when I have some time to write queries for it :)

Yves--

Thanks for the link! We read that post awhile back. Europe sure is expensive. We're both looking forward to heading into a country where the exchange rate is actually in our favor!

mdev--

I've thought about it but I have way to many projects going on right now as it is! Maybe when we get home.

RE: exchange rate
I have the average exchange stored at the leg level. I could (and will) use it to show the daily total in USD (or any other currency, you can set the 'primary' currency at the trip level). I just haven't put it into the query yet.

I thought about storing the rate on every day but decided the average for a given leg is enough precision for us.
Posted by Tyler on October 26th, 2009 at 5:46 AM