MotoPlaner URL (.url)
A MotoPlaner URL is a route link from motoplaner.de, a German motorcycle route-planning site that stored an entire route's waypoints directly in the URL after a "#".
At a glance
| Extension | .url |
| Encoding | text |
History
MotoPlaner was developed and run by a single operator, Denny Rieche. It shut down on 25 May 2018: Google's map tiles became a paid service from 11 June 2018 (which would have meant three-digit daily costs for the site), and the EU's GDPR took effect the same day the site closed, adding compliance work a solo operator couldn't sustain alongside a full-time job. On shutdown, the operator redirected remaining traffic to Kurviger, a similar German motorcycle route-planner, and Kurviger added an import for MotoPlaner's old route links.
Where it is used
A MotoPlaner link was created by planning a route on the site and sharing the resulting URL — anyone opening it saw the same route without needing an account. As of this writing, motoplaner.de itself returns an HTTP 404 with an expired TLS certificate; the redirect to Kurviger the operator set up in 2018 is no longer in effect, so an old MotoPlaner link no longer resolves to a live route on either site — it can still be parsed locally by pasting its address into RouteConverter.
Structure
The URL's fragment (after "#") is a semicolon-separated list of "latitude,longitude" pairs, each written with 6 decimal places. Every pair index after the first two also carries a leading "1," control prefix from RouteConverter's own writer; RouteConverter's reader strips that marker when re-parsing a route it wrote itself, but its exact meaning to the original MotoPlaner site was never documented publicly and isn't asserted here.
How widespread
MotoPlaner has been offline since 2018; a route link in this format today is an old, previously-shared MotoPlaner URL rather than anything a currently-live service produces.
RouteConverter support
| Reads | MotoPlaner URL |
| Writes | MotoPlaner URL |
RouteConverter reads a MotoPlaner URL pasted directly into it (up to 100 positions by default, a preference the user can raise) and can write a route back out as a .url Internet Shortcut file pointing at a reconstructed motoplaner.de link, even though the site itself no longer resolves it.