Find Penguins
OUR COMMUNITY APP FIND PENGUINS
A DIGITAL STAMP BOOK? WHAT IS THAT?
Stamps or, in earlier times, plaques have always been popular to collect while hiking. They are memories or small mementos of a good time. In the meantime, we have all arrived in the digital age and it is obvious to keep up with the times here as well. But the app is also a diary, many crazy things happen on a thruhike that are worth writing down. Whether you share your experiences with others or just do it for yourself is up to you.
“I go to nature to get away from the digital world and all the social media nonsense, I don’t need any of that!”
A good and understandable objection, but this is exactly the purpose of a long-distance hiking trail like the NST. People who just want to be on the trail for themselves are not interested in being in some “hall of fame”. Live and let live or “Hike your own Hike”.
But there are also many people who want to interact or who simply want to record their trip as a memory, and this is where Find Penguins comes in. Why not just use Instagram?
Once you have used Find Penguins, you quickly realise the advantage. Personally, I really enjoyed this stamp book/diary and the feedback from the community helped me to continue on my own Thruhike. If you want to find yourself in the “Hall of Fame” after a successful Thruhike, you have to register your Thruhike first and verify it with Find Penguins.
“Unbelievable! I’m not going to let them control me while I’m hiking! “
The noisy minority crackles in outdoor forums who haven’t even looked at how it works.
So do we “monitor” or “control” thruhikers with this app? No, of course we don’t. We don’t want to and we don’t care where, how and when a Thruhiker walks, takes a shortcut, takes a break and so on…. The app does offer a tracker function, but this is not needed for an NST Thruhike.
For the entry into the Hall of Fame, your digital stamps are only briefly viewed, similar to the Compostela on the Way of St. James. Your app can be set to “private” for the entire journey if you wish. In the end, a few screenshots of your map will suffice (see photo). However, if you share your journey with the community, a whole new world will open up for you. You will get help or visitors, you can expect Trail Magic or simply good advice at the right time from experienced long-distance walkers. It is and remains your decision how and to what extent you use this fantastic app. Another great advantage of this app is that you can only add selected people. This way you can send a daily update to your parents, friends or partners and tell them about your trip or just say “I’m fine”. I hope we have answered all your questions about using Find Penguins. Now we come to a short tutorial. How do I create a new journey and how do I use the programme?
FIRST STEPS
After you have downloaded the free app, installed it and created a profile, we now create the journey for the NST. I prefer to do this work on my desktop than on my smartphone, but of course both work.
In the next field you can give the trip a name, enter a short description, start and end date (which can be changed at any time later) and of course choose a thumbnail.
Now comes the most important decision – your privacy. Here you can define who is allowed to follow you. I recommend the setting “followers only” to make sure that people who are really interested in your journey follow you. Now ask yourself, “How do people find out about my journey?” When you sign up for your ThruHike on the NST homepage, you can give us permission to let the Find Penguin community know about your trip in our newsletter, so that enough nice people will follow you.
Congratulations, your journey is now created. Now you can make further settings or change settings you have already made.
THE TWO BASIC SETTINGS FOR THE NST
Now we switch to the smartphone view, where we will be logged in most of the time during our hike.
Attention. Never activate the tracker. In the “Feed” you will find the Travel Tracker symbol (compass needle) in the upper area. If you activate this, your journey will be recorded “live” and visible to everyone. Of course, we don’t want that and this method also consumes too much battery.
Method 1. The Simple one..
For this method you don’t need to do anything else but activate the button “Itinerary” in the advanced settings of your trip. Now Find Penguins will automatically draw a line between the footprints (stamps). That’s it.
Method 2. the more beautiful.
With this method, we load a GPX track modified for Find Penguins into our trip beforehand. Important, it must be done before the first footprint.
The upload can take some time and is also better done on the PC. Of course, with this method, you can turn off the “Itinerary” button, because no connecting lines are needed anymore. Now you have the whole route mapped relatively detailed on your map. You can find the download of the special GPX track here.
I personally prefer this method, because it just looks better.
GPX Track für FindPenguins
YOUR FIRST FOOTPRINT
What is a footprint? A record, or what we call a digital stamp. A footprint can contain photos and even small videos or just text. Of course, you can also set each individual footprint to private, i.e. not publicly visible, if you want to make private notes, for example.
Let`s go. Set “New Footprint”. The location is normally determined very accurately and automatically. However, you can enter your location yourself by clicking on the crayon. You can also move and edit each location later. Next you fill in all fields, title of the footprint, date, your text and of course the photos or videos. All photos/videos and texts can be moved and edited after uploading. Now just set private or public and upload. Congratulations, you have just set your first footprint.
And on it goes, according to this method you can now set one footprint after the other.
Here is a tip for a sensible setting that you should definitely get used to.
Do you suddenly see strange lines and connections on your map? Then you forgot to activate “Off route”. I don’t know if it’s a bug in the program, but you have to activate this option for every footprint. You can find the setting under “Advanced settings” in your footprint menu. Don’t worry, you will get used to it. But that’s it for the tutorial. Not that difficult, is it?
Just try something around or take a small test hike before the NST where you can familiarize yourself with the program at your leisure. Have fun and welcome to the Penguins…
A little disclaimer: We are not sponsored by Find Penguins and do not receive any other benefits or contributions.