Crickles BETA features

You may have noticed recently that there is a new report on the Navigator that requires a password, and that a few of the posts on this website are now password protected. This reflects some significant changes to Crickles that are being released initially in a BETA programme. If you’d like to participate and check out the new features please read on…

To access the BETA functionality

Send an email requesting access to ian@crickles.org.

I will need your Date of Birth – this will enable us to factor in age into the new analysis.

This aside, you are only asked to agree to:

1. Accepting the confidentiality terms;
2. Giving me feedback;
3. Acknowledging the limitations of the beta.

This is all described further in the Mechanics of the beta section below.

Please do try it out!

Here’s what’s in the beta:

More analysis of heart rate data

One of the main features of the BETA is a new Regularity report. This gives a new type of analysis on your heart rate data. It also gives some analysis on the “strap crap” that is filtered out by the Crickles data cleaning routines.

For those on the programme, a full description is available here.

Just your data

To date, all of the analysis on the Navigator has been available to everyone on an “all see all” basis. The new report is potentially more confidential in character and so each athlete can see only his or her own data. This is why we now require a password to access that report. In future, we may password-protect more information, such as FTP curves – subject to what people would prefer. However, peer comparisons are super-useful and we’ll keep these as a prominent feature.

Strava Friends

To date, you can compare yourself to others using the Group dropdown. However, apart from the gender sub-selection that this offers, this isn’t useful for most of the Crickles population. On the beta, once you’re logged in you can now choose Strava Friends from the Group dropdown. This then enables you to compare yourself specifically against your Strava friends on the relevant reports (Relative CSS, Relative Profile, All-in and This week). This is much more meaningful – and you can still compare yourself to the overall Crickles cohort and your gender group.

Mechanics of the beta

1. Please email me as above to request a password. All passwords are encrypted in use and cannot be hacked in plain from a web server. However your password is not encrypted “in flight” when I send it to you. If you are concerned about security I can text you your password instead of emailing it, and if you’re very worried I can give it you by phone.
2. At this stage I haven’t built a mechanism for you to choose or re-set your own password. Also, the password setting process is still manual and it may take me a while to get round to sending out yours if a lot of people ask for them.
3. As far as I’m aware, this new analysis, and indeed some of the existing analysis, is unique and unavailable anywhere else. While I’m continuing to develop it, please treat it as commercially sensitive – for example, don’t email Strava describing it and asking for them to copy it!
4. To log in, choose the Regularity report, which will throw the log-in screen (unless you’re already logged in). The User ID you need is simply your Strava ID (e.g. mine is 301194). You can see this on the Athlete dropdown in brackets. Once you’ve logged in you’ll be returned to the main page (Relative CSS) and will need to choose Regularity again to see it.
5. While this functionality is still in beta, you can always escape back to the current way that the Navigator works by refreshing the page. This will log you out. On Safari at least, the browser caches your ID and password so you don’t need to re-enter them. The iPhone doesn’t do this – when we move beyond beta I intend to build this into Crickles so that you will rarely need to re-enter your credentials.
6. You will also get a general-purpose password for accessing the protected posts on crickles.org.

If you sign up to try out the beta, please could you give me feedback on the new features. It would also be super-helpful to know:

• what you use Crickles for;
• what you never use;
• roughly how often you look at the Navigator;
• whether you ever use Crickles Activity Charts;
• what further improvements would make Crickles most helpful.