When I was a little kid my family moved from Philadelphia, PA to a suburb of Boston.  I spent most of my early years in big “small town" called Billerica, MA.  I still remember coming down our street for the first time in the moving van.  Well at least  I think I remember; I was really young when we moved and now realize might have pieced that memory together from photos of me on my Dad’s lap in the moving van and stories my parents told me about that day. 

But in that moving day picture in my head I can remember seeing the the neighbor kids for the first time that day; Shawn, Mike, John & Roger and the one girl on our street; Judi.  They were all on their bikes, looking cool and tough and bigger than me.  I was the new kid and smaller than the rest.  John said "Hi, wanna play trucks?" eyeing the cast metal Ford tractor I was holding in my hand.  I said "sure" and that was that.

Friend request accepted. 

We were all roughly the same ages/grades and every day after school we were completely...

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Facebook is huge and a lot of people use it daily. Most of our members use it too.  Because it’s so big it makes a great target for hackers.  Lately, a number of people who are members on this site and Facebook have had their FB accounts hacked.  Here is typically how this happens:

You see a link posted by on of your FB Friends.  It says something like “Can you believe they still have this? tinyurl/3455/….” ...

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So we’ve made most of the updates for our new improved BikeCliques and now we’re starting to see people use them.  Our team (BikeClicks.com/Team Louisville) volunteered (and I mean that in the “they were volunteered” sense of the word) to test our new BikeClique functionality early on.  We migrated from our other site and get everyone up and running pretty quickly.  I have to give the team a lot of props on this as we had a number of bugs and issues and hard to use stuff initially, and they all patiently waited and provided feedback and suggestions until we got everything sorted out.   Now, I think the entire team is using it daily and we’re communicating about everything from quick little “Who’s riding today” on our team “wall” to more in-depth conversations about training and racing in our forums.

So while we still have a few more functional improvements to make I think it’s time to start making the cliques a larger part of what BikeClicks.com is all about.  We still have separate communities forums...

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As part of our continued rollout of some great new features here on BikeClicks.com we’ve been preparing the site structure, updating the look and feel and setting up the site navigation in preparation for the Big Kahona…the new BikeCliques.  Let’s review just what and why we’re doing this shall we? 

Currently the site has BikeCliques and Communities.  BikeCliques can be created by our member to keep track of friends and post messages on a wall, etc…but they are pretty basic lack a full blown forum and are quite hard to use.  Communities are full blown forums and are where the majority of our members spend their time participating in conversation, planning rides and trail days, etc. and while they are easy to use they need to be created by us (well me actually) which takes a lot of effort and means that only the larger cycling groups such as team, clubs and events have them setup.  Furthermore, since our goal from day one has been to bring all aspects of cycling together in one place – even with many communities...

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One of the things we’ve notice around here is aside from uploading an avatar there really isn’t much you can do with your member profile.  We though it would be cool if you could use your profile to connect with other members, keep track of which BikeCliques





you belong, post you blogger or twitter feed, let your friends know about a great website, upload a photo…really whatever.  The new member profiles on BikeClicks.com include all of this functionality and more. 

Some of the highlights include:

Write Notes about what’s going on

...

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Later this month we’ll begin to roll out some new features on BikeClicks.com.  These features have been in the works since July and we’re pretty excited about them.  This post is the first of a few that will begin to explain some of these features and make sure everyone knows what to expect with these upcoming changes.  The good news is that we’re only going to gain features and in all honesty, these changes will allow us to keep things way more organized around here.  It also allows our members to do more with BikeClicks.com than they ever have before.

...

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A month or so ago I posted about an idea we had to make it very easy for cyclists to visualize dangerous areas of their city.  As we all know, many cyclists are hit by cars, chased by dogs and yelled at or “buzzed” by angry drivers each day.  While the most serious of these events make the nightly news in our hometown, many (I would bet most) incidents and even accidents never get reported beyond the cyclist telling their riding buddies about it the next day. 

But wouldn’t it be nice to “see” sections of town that have an unusually high number...

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I’ve would like to implement some improved photo features on our site.  A few changes will need to take place, namely changing the focus of photos away from album specific photos to user specific, and then adding the ability to tag photos easily.  Tagging photos would allow you to identify friends or groups or events easily by clicking on a photo (or a section of a photo) and selecting or entering a tag that connects that photo to the person, group or event.

Here is an example of how it could work:







...

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Our forums have a lot of features that many members don’t know about.  Did you know, for example, you can easily check in on all of the posts made or updated since the last time you visited the site?  Or that you can track a specific topic or forum and get an email sent automatically every time someone posts?  What if you wanted to to see all of the posts you’ve made in a community or you want to contact another member but don’t want to post a message publicly?

Here are a few of the major features available in our community forums.  This information assumes you already have a BikeClicks account, know how to log into the site and can create a post on any of our communities.

 ...

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A number of the communities on BikeClicks.com are setup for teams only.  They are private communities that allow team members to communicate about their own super secret team stuff (like how they are going to win the Tour de France this year, or maybe something a little less ambitious like where the training ride is going to leave from on Saturday.

In either case, if your team has a community setup on BikeClicks.com then this post explains how to access it for the first time.  We’ll start with registering your account on BikeClicks.com.  Now, if you already have a BikeClicks account then you can skip ahead to step two. Also, you can click on the images which illustrate in more detail how to register and subscribe.

Step One: Register on BikeClicks.com

To register an account either click on the “Register” link on the top of any BikeClicks.com page, or go straight to...

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