Hey everyone!
I’m a passionate hiker and biker and do record my tours with some apps. I also upload my tours with some photos and comments to these famous platforms Komoot and Bergfex. Already a while ago, I started to put this content in my blog first, and just as a second step in these platforms, where usually also link to the blog post. The thing that bothered me most was, that there was no interactive map and also no statistics of my hike/bike tour in the blog. My workaround was a screenshot of the tour in one of the apps mentioned above, but this always felt wrong.
Long story short:
Over the weekend, I built a plugin that renders an interactive map out of an GPX file I upload to Micro.blog. It took me some time, but this is now working. As GPX is basically just a referenced point with geocoordinates, the pure GPX doesn’t hold any additional information, such as climbed hight, distance, or the peaks you reached.
Though, these outdoor platforms can calculate a lot out of the GPX and also have nice databases to show all kind of additional information which is not available for me, without going totally crazy with a small Micro.blog plugin. But I found some clever (manual) workarounds to add some additional information in the shortcode, that can get rendered alongside the interactive map. Sure, this means some extra efforts, but I’m fine with it, for my 10-15 tours per year.
You can find the plugin here: GitHub - flschr/mbplugin-tours: A Micro.blog plugin for interactive tour widgets with maps, statistics, and peak lists for your hike and bike trips. Very much like what you can get from Komoot, but without relying on their infrastructure.
A rendered version of this plugin is in my blog post for my last tour, a week ago: Raus aus dem Münchner Nebel, rauf auf den Jägerkamp | René Fischer
So, now my questions
- The plugin requires a GPX file which I can upload to MB, but it will be renamed to JPG. I can rename it to XML (before and after the upload) and use that, and it works, but it would be cool if the upload of GPX files would be easy peasy, and doesn’t require manual steps.
- For whatever reason, I completely fail to get a nice interpretation of the plugin output for RSS/JSON feeds working. I really tried to come up with a dedicated table layout, but the feeds ignore ir completely. I remember, that I had similar experiences with my YouTube plugin, to get a different output for feeds. What am I doing wrong? Is it even possible, to influence the feeds?
On another note
Originally I planned to have a dedicated tours page and summit log, holding all my tours and achieved summits as filterable lists, with a nice maps view. I had no glue how to build something like that, especially because there is no access to front matter in MB, what even is the reason to build such a complex plugin. The only solution I came up with was something like a data.json, where I essentially store the short codes another time. But then the weekend was over, before going into exploration.
I believe, there are some options, as there is a database for books and movies, so there must be a way to store data and use it in pages, but I simply don’t know how. Or maybe, someone has an even better and simpler idea, for building such an archive page I described above?
So long, thanks for reading and thanks a lot for any help 
René