We are pleased to announce the introduction of a number of new membership options, available with immediate effect, in addition to our current standard annual membership. Both new and existing members can now choose annual, 6-monthly, quarterly or monthly membership.

Annual membership will continue to offer the best value (£20 a year for new members, equivalent to just £1.67 per month) and will still be backed by our Price-for-Life guarantee, so that the price you pay when you first join for a year never rises. The new options now offer the opportunity to take out shorter membership or to pay smaller amounts more frequently rather than for a whole year in one go.

The Membership Options available are now as follows:

Membership Option	Available From	Price	Price for Life Guarantee*
Annual Membership	Existing Option	£20 / year **
6-Monthly Membership	13/5/13	£13 / 6-months
3-Monthly Membership	13/5/13	£8 / 3-months
Monthly Membership	13/5/13	£3 / month

* Our Price-for-Life Guarantee - the price you pay when you join for a year is fixed for life, no prices, ever, guaranteed.

** All members can continue to renew their annual membership at the price paid when they first joined, as per our Price-for-Life Guarantee.

Just to let you know (in case you have a nocturnal urge to login in the middle of the night!), the website will be unavailable tonight from 1am for about 2 hours to allow some upgrades to be implemented on the server.

You may have noticed that we've introduced a new version of our popular Route Measurer tool. The new version gives you bigger maps, taking full advantage of the size of your screen. If you are using a compatible browser (currently Chrome or Firefox) you can also now expand the route measurer to fill the whole screen (as in the picture below), temporarily hiding any browser menus or tabs, by pressing the full-screen icon in the top right corner. And, there's a new option to hide the buttons on the right, to make the map even bigger! We've also moved the Follow-Roads switch onto the map to make it more accessible, as some people weren't aware that this feature was available.

Unfortunately, we were unable to make the full-screen maps available for Internet Explorer 7 due to limitations of this browser. If you are using Internet Explorer 7, we recommend that you upgrade Internet Explorer to a later version, or try an alternative browser like Google Chrome or Firefox.

Often new members ask us if there is a way to import all their past runs from their GPS device. To date, we haven't had a facility to import runs in bulk, but we're pleased to announce that we have just introduced a new tool to do this.

The Import GPS History tool, will upload up to 300 routes and runs at a time from a single TCX file, directly to your GRG Log Book. You can export your runs into a TCX file using the Garmin Training Center software that comes with most Garmin watches. Some other applications also provide a facility to export to a TCX too, although regrettably Garmin Connect only allows you to export one run at a time at present, so unfortunately we don't have a way to import from there yet. We'll report back when we've developed something for this.

This is a screenshot of the new import tool, which can be found on the Upload from a GPS page (under the Log Book menu):

Runs and routes are automatically named as they are uploaded, using the date of the run, but you can easily rename them afterwards from your My Routes page. The import tool will also match runs and routes being uploaded with existing ones you have in your Training Log to avoid duplicates and flag PB's for routes run more than once.

While primarily developed as a way for new members to import their past runs when they join, the tool can of course be used by any member as a way of importing their runs.

We hope you'll find the new tool useful and welcome any feedback from anyone using it.

If you're a regular user of the site, I'm sure you'll have noticed that we've given the design a bit of a refresh. We know that design is very much a personal taste but we're hoping that everyone will feel that the new, softer, colour scheme is an improvement on the previous one. We'd love to hear your views on the changes and any suggestions for us to consider for the future, so we've started a a new topic on the Forum called "Website Design Comments" - just post to this topic if you have any feedback or suggestions.

To help compare the difference, below are two screenshots of the main home page, before and after the changes:

Before

After