About
SearchFor.us was developed in record time, born out of a time-critical need to aggregate hundreds of disparate GPS hiking tracks from people searching for missing hiker Shelby Campbell.
Site Features
- GPX and XML file upload
- Custom Bing Maps integration
- Utilizes HTML5 Location API to overlay user’s precise GPS position on the map
Development Details
- Laravel 7.x
- No database – GPX and XML are dumped straight to the disk (like I said, we were in a hurry)
- Self-hosted on a VPS
This history of this website is sad and brief. On September 8th, 2020, 29 year-old Shelby Campbell went missing on a hike in the mountains near North Ogden, Utah. Several hundred volunteers quickly began searching for her and organized a Facebook group to try and coordinate their search.
Unfortunately, Facebook groups aren’t a great way to coordinate big groups of people geographically. Individuals in the group began posting screenshots from Strava and other run/hike-tracking apps. At the peak, the Facebook group saw dozens of screenshots submitted by different users every day. Seeing one individual’s hike at a time doesn’t do a great job of conveying which areas the group as a whole has and has not covered.
That’s where the idea for this website came in – we wanted a way to overlay everyone’s searches onto one big map – make it clear as day which parts of the mountain had been searched well, and which had not.
The website isn’t anything to write home about, but it does the job. One upload form to accept GPX or XML exports from the popular hike-tracking apps, and a Bing Maps instance to display the aggregate of all uploaded searches. Fortunately, Bing Maps has native support for overlaying GPX and XML files directly onto a map – that made the output side exceptionally easy.
This was a joint project between my good friend Brian Allen and myself. Over the course of just a few hours on a single Saturday, we bought a domain, provisioned a VPS, got an SSL certificate, set up a git repository and CD/CI, and coded out the site. Between September and November 2020, we saw 10k page views and single-day peak of 650 unique users.