BarCrawl

Virtual Pubcrawls with StreetView

2009-04-05T11:34:00.011+01:00

The new virtual pub crawl addition to BarCrawl has been released! Since Google released Street View support for cities in the UK we've been busy coding this into the site and now its here. Street View currently supports 25 cities in the uk, of which 22 we have covered in BarCrawl. So any pub crawls in those cities now have a new link where you can see the crawl virtually!

All you need to do is press the 'Crawl' button below the view to start moving along the crawl virtually. Some crawls work better than others - in fact some crawls won't work at all - with this feature due mainly to the fact that Google Street View doesn't cover all streets so some routes will take the nearest alternative. Some unexpected results may also occur if our pub locations aren't precise enough, we are continually updating this data. So please bear in mind this is still only a Beta feature!

Please note that if you wish to use the virtual crawl feature with a pub crawl you have created on BarCrawl then currently you have to save it first (which requires logging in). So the process is:

Create a pub crawl by finding and adding pubs (using a map or standard search).
Click on Your Crawl (right hand side orange box) at any time to edit your current crawl.
When you have finished editing your crawl click Save or Login/Join (joining is of course free) if you are not logged in.
Once you have saved your crawl you can then view the virtual crawl by clicking Your Account and following the link to your pub crawl. You can also find your pub crawl on the public Pub Crawls page.

Here's a couple of our favourites

Otley Run
Olde Oxford Crawl
The King Street Run

Leave a comment if you spot something a bit weird, there might be some things that we can tweak, to improve this.

Some of the best user created pub crawls so far

2009-01-17T12:56:00.018Z

For years the BarCrawl website has provided a tool for users to create random pub crawls. A major overhaul of the site in the middle of 2008 added the ability for BarCrawl users to create and save their own custom pub crawls. A pub crawl can be created by finding pubs - interactively using a map or searching by text - and then adding the chosen watering holes to your crawl by clicking the 'Add To Crawl' button from the either the pub page or the map pop-up.

This has proven quite popular as you can see by the abundant user creations on this page. Some of these are well known pub crawls such as the Monopoly Pub Crawl or the Otley Run, some are clearly random but most look to have had some thought and effort put into them.

As you can see the pub crawls page is currently just one gigantic list of user created pub crawls. This can be broken down by city but needs work to present the data a bit more usefully, this will be done sometime soon. In the meantime we thought it would be good to list some of the interesting looking pub crawls created thus far:

London Station Crawl
Mumbles Mile
Seafront Stroll (Brighton)
Olde Oxford
Rose Street Crawl (Edinburgh)
A Bridge To Far? (London)
St Mary Street Crawl (Cardiff)
Derby Mile
Castle Hill To Mill Road (Cambridge)
The Clockwork Orange Pub Crawl (Glasgow)
Animals (London) - pub names with animals in them
Brighton A 2 Z
Oxfordtur 2008 (Oxford) - with tourist info in some scandanavian language
Hull Crawl - Old Town
Unlucky for Some (London)
Manchester's finest
Wards Santa Suits Christmas Day Out (London) - includes lyrics for singing in between pubs!
Me & Hil New Year's Eve Eve (London) - liked the idea: a crawl retracing a night out rather than planning it

More suggestions welcome!

New Feature: Click 'Show Route' on a pub crawls page to do route finding on a crawl and show the over all distance.

2009-01-15T19:19:00.004Z

Welcome.

We at BarCrawl thought it might be worthwhile creating a blog to accompany the BarCrawl website, so here it is. What are we going to blog about? Well largely that remains to be seen but some of things that spring to mind are: highlighting some of the interesting pub crawls you've created; discussing pub crawls and pub crawl ideas generally; letting you know about improvements to the site and providing somewhere for you to post suggestions; talking about pubs and bars...

Think that'll do for now. In the next post we'll take a look at the best pub crawls you've created on BarCrawl so far. Maybe give a few tips too.