James Houston
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Josh Reid’s new website

Josh Reid’s new website went live today. Josh is an ultra-distance cyclist and filmmaker. In 2019 he collected a bike from the Giant factory in Shanghai and rode it 15,000 km home to Newcastle, and since then he’s raced the Tour Divide and the Badlands with a camera running.

The aim was for everything to happen as automatically as possible. All Josh has to do is set the dates of an event and save his rides on Strava as he always does. The website takes care of the rest.

Events

It builds on my earlier work on route maps, for British Cycle Tracks and Carlton Reid’s ride around Britain, and adds the idea of an event: a race or a tour of several days, with all its rides grouped together.

When Josh saves a ride during an event, it turns up on the site with a page of its own: the route, distance, climbing and time, an elevation profile, and his photos placed along the route by the time they were taken. A one-off ride outside any event can have its own event too, just by adding a hashtag to the ride’s description on Strava. Older trips can be brought in from Strava in one go, or from KML files.

Each event page puts all its rides on one map, with a chart of the distance and climbing for each day.

A map of western North America with Josh’s Tour Divide route drawn in green from the Canadian Rockies down to the Mexican border, with numbered circles for each day’s ride, and a bar chart of distance and climbing per ride underneath
The Tour Divide, 2025: 4,400 km from Canada to Mexico in 21 days. See the event.

On a ride’s page, the Visualise route button flies you along the route over 3D terrain. I got a bit carried away and built a 3D version too, for red and blue glasses. It worked well, on desktop at least, but that one didn’t make it onto the live site!

Josh’s Banff to Fernie ride page during the flyover: the route drawn in orange along a valley between steep, snow-streaked mountains in 3D satellite view, with Sulphur Mountain labelled, an elevation profile and play controls underneath, and the ride’s distance, climbing, start time and speed beside it
Flying along Banff to Fernie, the first day of the Tour Divide. Try it.

Films and pictures

The home page puts Josh’s films first. His latest YouTube films and Instagram pictures are fetched and cached, so they stay up to date without him doing anything, and so do the YouTube subscriber count and the kilometres he’s logged on Strava, on the About page.

The top of Josh’s home page: a black and white photo of Josh riding towards the camera on a gravel road with a loaded bike, framed with viewfinder corners and a red REC light, under the words Adventures in Cycling, Videos from the saddle
The home page.

Built to reuse

I’ve built it so I can easily add the same logic to other sites. The part that processes rides doesn’t mind what kind of website it’s publishing to.

Josh’s videos

How Josh manages to create such amazing films whilst competing in these events is mind-boggling! He does a superb job of capturing the scenery and feel of the ride, and his interactions with others make the films really enjoyable to watch. Go check out his YouTube channel.

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