Add a hill?

Before you add a new hill, check to make sure someone hasn't already added the same one. You can do that by searching for the hill.

If you're sure it's not already uploaded, then start by creating an account. Verify the email that's sent to you, and log on. Now you will see a menu entry on the left sidebar called "Create hill". Click it and you'll find yourself on a page with a form to fill out.

There's a field for Hill Name and for Street Name. That's because one street may have many different hills on it that can be added separately, and a hill may not be on a street at all! Only the Hill Name is required.

To select multiple categories, such as different types of rides or difficulty, hold down the control key (CTRL - Windows PC or COMMAND - Apple) and click the options you want.

When entering city, please make sure you spell it correctly. If someone has already added a hill to your city, then it will appear on the list as you start typing. For example, if you are adding a hill in Durban, if you type "Du" and wait half a second, a list will appear with all cities starting with "Du", for example "Durban" and "Dublin". This will help you to choose the right spelling.

Try give a good description of the hill, image that you'd never ridden it and you were describing it to someone.

There are more specific instructions for specifying length, width and height on the rest of these help pages.

You can also upload your Google Earth data file. You can't upload one data file with many hills in it - you have to separate them out, so that one data file contains the paths, icons and placemarks for one hill only. This allows us to have very rich map data for individual hills.

Please see creating a map data file for help on creating these .KML or .KMZ files in a way that Hill Bomb can accept them.

Convert miles and kilometers?

At the moment you have the option to specify length and width measurements in miles, feet, kilometers or meters. We're working on a better solution where each user will specify their preferred measurement, and the site takes care of the conversion automatically.

Until then, you'll have to use Google if you want to convert! Try it out - type in "32km in miles" into Google search box, and click "Search". You'll see the converted amount as the first search result.

Click this link for an example.

Create a map data file?

At the heart of Hill Bomb is the ability to integrate with Google Maps. We do this by allowing you to upload tiny data files that contain the location and exact path of the run, plus any extra points you may want to add.

Start by downloading Google Earth if you haven't already. You can get it from http://earth.google.com. Follow the installation instructions to get it up and running.

Next, zoom in to the hill you want to upload to Hill Bomb. You can either do this using the mouse controls, or by typing the location into the Google Earth "Fly to" box, where it will search and find your location automatically. Make sure you get nice and close to your hill:

Now click on the "Add path" tool (circled in red below), or click "Add -> Path" on the main menu, to add a new path.

The following dialog will open, where you can type a name and description. You can now click points on the screen to draw the exact path that a rider would take down the hill. Mark out the entire hill this way, using the controls in the top right of the screen or the arrow keys if you need to pan around. Make sure you keep the "new path" dialog open while you draw your path.

Once you've finished mapping the path, and you've closed that dialog, you'll see your new path appear under the "My places" list.

You can now right-click on the path and choose "Save As" to save just that path as either a .KMZ or .KML file. It doesn't matter which one you use, but the KMZ is smaller. Please don't use special characters like accented letters.

Save it somewhere like your desktop. That's the file that you need to attach when you create a new hill on Hill Bomb!

Of course, you don't have to have just one path per hill. It's easy to use the other tools in Google Earth to create placemarks, with different icons and colours, plus extra descriptions for anything your heart desires. Mark out hazards, points of interest or certain parts of the hill.

Make sure that you save all the placemarks and other items together with the path into the same folder.

You'll see the "Inanda run" folder which I've created under "My Places". You can create folders by right-clicking on "My Places" and choosing "Add->Folder". Once you're sure you've got everything together, right-click the folder, choose "Save As" and save it to your desktop as a .KMZ or .KML, ready for upload to Hill Bomb.

Now, when you upload your hill and data file to Hill Bomb, the Google Map will appear on your hill with all your paths, icons and placemarks:

If you've changed the colours of the default icons in Google Earth, they may revert back to their original colours when displayed on the map. Unfortunately that's a problem with Google. If you want coloured icons, rather choose default icons that are already the colours you want in Google Earth.

Edit hills?

You can edit any hill you like on Hill Bomb. As long as you're logged on, and looking at a hill's page, you'll see a link along the top called "Edit". Clicking it will open a form where you can change any of the attributes of the hill.

You'll see a field called "Why are you making changes?" on the edit form. Use this field to describe to others why you're changing things. It only appears on the revisions list of a hill, so make it descriptive please.

Good reasons to edit a hill:

• you have more information for the description
• correcting a spelling mistake on the city or street names
• adjusting the ratings for traffic flow / surface condition
• uploading a new map data file with more or clearer data points
• changing the main image to something better
• adding a category like 'beginner' or a ride like 'Freebord'

Bad reasons to edit a hill which will get your account removed:

• you're pissed off with someone and feel like scribbling over all the hills they've added
• you don't like skateboarders/longboarders/(insert ride) and you feel like removing them from hill categories
• you feel like writing "I am a king! LOL!!!1!1!!" on the description of a hill

Once a hill is edited, an email immediately goes out to all those who are subscribed to that hill. All hill changes are saved, and can instantly be reverted (just like Wikipedia), so if you do any bad things to people's hills, not only will they be able to immediately fix it, but your name will be registered and banned from the site. Don't do it... ;)

Please note that the hill description is not a place to talk about your various experiences riding it (that's what the comments are for). A description should describe the hill itself, nothing more.

Get my hill to the front page?

We put most hills on the front page, but if you don't include a main image or your uploaded map data doesn't work, then we won't show it on the front. Please see the rest of the help section for guidance on how to make your hill suitable for the front page.

Manage email subscriptions?

Subscriptions send you email every time content you are interested in gets updated or modified.

If you click the "My account" link on the left side menu, you'll be taken to your profile. From there, click "Subscriptions".

On this page, you can change the settings for how you would like to receive emails. You can turn off auto-subscribing, as well as change to a digest email if you prefer.

If you click on the "Threads" link, you can subscribe or un-subscribe from any individual threads.

If anything is unclear, please post a question in the forum or contact us!

Measure the height of a hill?

This is easy using Google Earth - you simply hover the mouse over the start and finish points, and look at the value given for "elevation" (elev):

Get the difference between the two using your calculator, and add it as an attribute of your hill.

Hill Bomb uses this value to calculate the decline of your hill. An example:

On a hill that's 200m long, with a 100m height difference, for every 2m that you travel forwards, you're going down by 1m. That's a 50% decline, i.e. you're dropping at a rate of 50% of distance travelled. The higher this number, the steeper the hill!

Measure the length and width of a hill?

Using Google Earth, you can easily measure hills. Just select "Tools -> Ruler" from the main menu, and choose "Path" from the dialog that pops up.

Now, you can zoom right up to a hill and measure it's width by clicking twice - once on either side of the hill.

Length is also easy - just click a number of times to draw a line down the hill. Unfortunately, at this time Google Earth does not support giving you the measurement of an existing path. You have to use the ruler to draw over your existing one.

You could also go to the hill with a car and measuring tape and measure it manually by driving the distance and checking the odometer.

Search for hills?

Click the "Find hills" link on the top menu, which will take you to a page that acts as a guided search. If you're looking for hills in your area, a good place to start is by clicking on the name of your country on the guided search list.

Or, for example, you could be looking for all hills that are rated as "Pro" level. You'd then start by clicking "Pro" on the guided search.

A list will appear with all the hills that match your first term. Now, to refine your search, click on the second term that you want either from the list of terms on the left, or on the term as shown in the list.

So if you first clicked "South Africa" then "Freebord", you'd be looking at all hills tagged with both those terms, and you'd see the following on your screen:

To go back, simply click the red cross next to one of the terms that you want to delete.

It's as easy as that!

You'll also notice a Google Map at the bottom of the results. This map will automatically include all the hill map data that is listed on the current page.