A calmer home for everything
Most of this week’s work is the kind you hope never to notice: Story Trail moved house. But there were a few changes you will notice, especially if you’ve been walking with the AR board.
For walkers: the notice board stands where the story is
In AR walking mode the notice board now sits at the waypoint itself, and it scales with how far away you are, so it stays readable as you approach instead of hovering at a fixed distance. The post and glowing disc that mark a stop used to vanish the moment you arrived. They now stay put until you’re 50 metres past, so a child who has run ahead and doubled back can still find the spot. The disc is also brighter, and the pop-out model is 20% larger (from 0.7 m to 0.84 m), which makes a difference outdoors in daylight.
Trail pages in the app now show the whole hero photo, rather than cropping it.
New sign-ups also arrive somewhere more useful. Instead of starting on their profile page, new walkers are sent to the map, where the trails are.
For historians: move a photo to a different stop
Photos sometimes get attached to the wrong stop, especially when research turns up a good picture of the building next door. In Suburb Historian you can now move a photo, whether it’s the stop’s main photo or one from its gallery, to another stop in the same study, with no need to remove and re-find it.
For developers and partners: published-trail webhooks
The Story Trail API can now tell other systems when a trail changes. Subscribe through the new subscription API and you’ll receive signed notifications when a trail is published, updated, unpublished, or deleted. It’s aimed at the community sites and historical societies who want their own pages to stay in step with the walks, without anyone remembering to update them by hand. The MCP connector and llms.txt now point to it too.
Under the hood: one new home
The apps used to run on separate hosted services. This week the walking API and the Suburb Historian tool both moved onto a single shared server of our own, alongside its database. It has nightly backups, daily disk snapshots, alarms for the disk, memory, and missed backups, and a patching policy. The old hosting and the database service it replaced have been retired and their secrets cleaned up. Walkers shouldn’t notice anything, but it makes running Story Trail simpler and cheaper, and it leaves less to go wrong while the apps head towards the App Store. The iPhone app’s internal admin check now points at the new historian address, and the app records which screens people visit in the same way as the Android app, so we can see where walkers get stuck.