The rain showers and thunderstorms this weekend gave us the perfect excuse to stay indoors and work on the website. We've listed the major changes below.

Better error handling
Did any of you try to plan a bike route to Jersey City, Yonkers, or Nassau County? If you tried to get to any of these locations -- or to anywhere else that is not in our street network database -- you probably noticed a nasty bug that could only be bypassed with a page refresh. We now handle this exception and a few others more gracefully.

Printing
The site now prints a nice, clean set of turn-by-turn directions. As we mentioned earlier, getting the map to print properly is going to take a little more work.

Thanks to Google's incredibly smart geocoder, you don't need to know the address or intersection of your favorite destinations. You can type them directly into the to/from address boxes.

Want to ride to Central Park? Type Central Park, NY into the destination address box. Heading up to the George Washington Bridge? Try George Washington Bridge. Making it a beach day? Try Coney Island.

We've done some testing and it works with bridges, parks, neighborhoods, boroughs, airports, colleges and universities, and iconic NYC locales like Times Square. In some cases, you may also need to specify the borough or you'll get a park in Baltimore with the same name.

Ever need to park your bike at a bike shop to pick up a patch kit, a tube, or get a quick front brake check?

In addition to suggesting a safe route from start to finish, Ride the City shows you where bike shops are located along your route. Click on a bike shop icon (it looks like a sprocket, or gear) and you can see its address, phone number, hours and website. (If you aren't seeing the bike shops, trying zooming in a little closer.)

If you know of bike shops that aren't on the map or if you have a correction for us, please use the feedback form to let us know.