Most apps that track outdoor activity do one thing well and everything else poorly. Strava is great for social fitness but terrible for visualising a 17-day bicycle expedition across a mountain range. GPS apps fragment your tracks across devices and sessions. None of them let you overlay your own routes on a topographic map and actually read the terrain.
So I built my own.
What it does
The Activity Dashboard is a single-page web application that pulls together all my outdoor activity — bicycle expeditions, hikes, trail runs — and displays them on an interactive map. Key features:
- Strava integration — imports all activities automatically via the Strava API, with GPS routes, distance, elevation, pace, and duration
- GPX file import — for activities not on Strava, including older expeditions and traces recorded with OsmAnd
- 9 switchable map layers — including OpenTopoMap, Thunderforest Outdoors, ESRI Satellite, CartoDB, and OpenStreetMap, so you can see your routes against the terrain that matters
- Elevation profiles — per-activity charts showing ascent and descent
- Filters — by activity type, difficulty, and data source
- Offline-capable — data is cached locally so the map works without a constant connection
Why I built it
I wanted one place where I could see everything — the 3,900 km Berlin to Lisbon ride, the 800 km Zanskar loop, the North Cape expedition — all on the same map, zoomable, layered against real topography. Something that would let me revisit a route and actually understand the landscape I moved through, not just see a coloured line on a grey background.
It is also a way of making my trails available to others. Anyone looking at a route I have done in the Kullu valley or Changthang can zoom in, see the terrain, and understand what the road or trail actually looks like.
How it was built
The dashboard is a single HTML file — no framework, no build step, just vanilla JavaScript, CSS, and a few carefully chosen libraries:
- Leaflet.js — for map rendering and layer management
- Strava API — OAuth 2.0 authentication to pull activity data
- Thunderforest — for the outdoor and cycling tile layers
- OpenTopoMap, ESRI, CartoDB, and OSM — free tile layers requiring no API key
The design principle was simplicity — a tool I would actually use, that loads fast, works on a phone in the field, and does not require an internet connection once the data is cached.
Status
The dashboard is live and accessible below. It is built as a standalone HTML file — no backend infrastructure, no framework, just a single page that loads fast and works on any device.
Drop me a line if you are interested in the code or want to build something similar.