WebGuy's Blog

The Field

steven@bikeclicks.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 04:27:18 GMT

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 inseparable. These were the days before XBOXs 360s and iPods and the internet…and [gasp] even cable TV. As my 13 year old son would say we were “medieval”. Despite the lack of distracting electronics and social media we did our best to make up for it with imagination and group play. Tonka Trucks, Hot Wheels Cars, Cops and Robbers & Cowboys and Indians (before the using the term "Indian" wasn't P.C . - heck there wasn't even a term for P.C.) filled the hours after school nearly every day. But our favorite thing to do in the entire world was to get on our bikes and ride in “The Field”.

“The Field” was about a five acre empty lot of grassy, sandy dirt with some scrubby bushes and a stand of trees on one end. Once part of the original farm that had been bought and sliced up and converted into the streets and houses that made up the neighborhoods that we all lived in during the 70’s, “The Field” was still a field because it was boxed in on all sides (and because of something my Dad used to talk about at dinner sometimes called an “egress issue”) so it remained undeveloped for years.

This was terrific for us kids because we had our own private five acre sandbox where we built bike tracks with dirt jumps and bermed turns with hiding holes and tunnels and stick forts for water balloon fights. We built an entire short track after seeing BMX on ABC Sports once and spent hours and hours of unsupervised time creating new sections and practicing over and over on our bikes. It was a blast and even to this day I remember how fun it felt to ride through our track in “The Field” on my bike on a cool Fall day with my friends. The sound of leaves crunching under our tires and whiffs of wood fires from the houses along the perimeter come back to me now every time I race my CX bike. (I think this is why I like racing Gun Club Cross so much now).

One weekend Mike and I snuck our Cub Scout collapsible shovels into backpacks, got on the bikes and headed to “The Field” to begin work on the mother of all jumps. We spent all day digging and building and packing and test jumping until we had it perfect. Just perfect. It was late in the day and we could hear Mike’s mom yelling for him to come home for dinner so we packed up our stuff and headed home with the plan to bring everyone back in the morning for an all out dirt fest.

The following morning we collected our friends and headed to the “The Field” only to be stopped by some men who were measuring the field and tying bits pink tape to stakes while they walked and pointed and said “You kids can’t be here. This is a construction zone”. Over the the rest of that Fall and Winter and into following Spring and Summer we watched our field slowly consumed by these men. First by bulldozers and backhoes, then by paving machines and framing crews and finally by houses and moving vans and families.

“The Field” was gone. Finally completing the last remaining section of our neighborhood.

At first, we were pissed. We schemed big battle plans that often involved night operations and included Mike’s Chinese Throwing Stars. Then we complained. We complained to each other, then to our parents then to each other’s parents. Then, eventually, we forgot. We road our bikes to other places. We found new trails behind the cemetery that led to fire roads and cool campsites where we found evidence that teenagers would hang out and have fires and smash bud bottles on the rocks. There were super secret lean to forts and old burned out cars and more trails and crazy fast downhill fire trails and more.

Eventually, we became friends with most of the kids in the new section of the neighborhood. We showed them the new trails we had discovered and told them about how great “The Field” used to be. You know - back in the day.

Lately, around Louisville, another big “small” town we moved to eleven years ago, there has been a lot of arm waving and yelling and anger and calls for action about another “field”. Our local CX practice course at River Road Country Club will eventually be re-developed in to what it was slated to be all along - soccer fields, a dog park and some mix use open spaces. A few of the local CX folks are currently somewhere in-between the "pissed” and “complaining” phases. I remember well how it felt. We busted our asses on that field. We created the track, the jumps the tunnels and forts. They were ours and then someone else said no and took them away. It sucks.

But the reality is that now, just like then, "The Field" was never ours. We simply had good times in someone else’s land on some borrowed time until that field became what it was planned to be all along. And also like those days, we’ll find new trails and discover new cool places and ideas and meet new people and have new “fields” to play in with our friends on those cold Fall days. To me, one of the things I love most about CX is that it brings back those memories from "The Field". Goofing off and riding bikes through mud and dirt and hanging out with fiends – except that the beverages are much better.

The Louisville CX scene is more than a course or a field. The USGP, our crown jewel of local CX credibility will stay. They've said so all along. If you don’t believe me then stop posting for a second and call or email Joan. She’ll tell you. The city government is also not made up of bad guys who are kicking us out. In fact, they’ve said consistently that they support CX and will work with the community to find a suitable practice course, And as far as RRCC going away, the truth is that we've know for four years that CX was not on the Master Plan for RRCC yet we've stubbornly refused to discuss alternatives or work with the city planners and Metro Parks to look at alternatives instead of only focusing on our “Field”.

You never know. The loss of our “field” might lead to something better just around the corner.

Facebook Spoof Page Hacks Accounts

steven@bikeclicks.com — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:42:41 GMT

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/….”
You click the link and see a Facebook login page.
Not thinking, you login to see your friend’s link.
Typically the link is NOT what you expected (adult material)
The trouble is that it wasn’t a Facebook login page. The URL of the site was some other site, but the login page was created to look exactly like the Facebook login (spoof). Now the hackers have your FB username and password
Now your friends have links posted by you (only you didn’t post them) and the cycle continues.

How do you fix it?

First, change your password. Even if you haven’t been hacked it’s a good idea to change your password regularly. Make it strong password, meaning is should be hard to guess and hard for a machine to systematically figure out (password is easy to guess, Fr3G!d$$f is much harder)
Notify your friends you’ve been hacked and NOT to fall for it.
Notify Facebook

These creeps rely on the inherent trust and relationships built between friends that is part of Facebook’s business model to hack your account. While FB seems to have blocked this latest spoof hack, at least 20 of my “FB friends” fell for it. Fortunately not from my account ;). Keep an eye out for this type of things as FB, as big as it is, will always be a target for this type of thing.

Starting to Use Our BikeCliques

steven@bikeclicks.com — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:36:36 GMT

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 and Cliques right now and even though I install planned a pretty hard “cutover” from one to the other, I think we need to easy people over more gradually. We'll still end up in the same place, but I think more people will be able to make the transition with us.

So, the plan is as follows:

1. Introduce BikeCliques on the homepage of the site to encourage members to join cliques they are interested in and perhaps even start to create their own.

2. Connect the existing forums to corresponding cliques so people can access topics from either the community section or their Clique.

3. Add members to Cliques automatically if they posts in a community forum in the past.

4. Introduce the new homepage “Wall” which will summarize all content from all your Cliques (and friends) onto your homepage.

5. Turn on the new homepage and turn off the community section.

I hope to get through all of this in April. Of course, we’re also rolling out some new features like personal photo galleries and videos, ride calendars, a ride catalog and more. So far the feedback has been mostly positive and our members are using the new functionality almost as fast as we’re rolling it out. Again, thanks for your patience as we continue to make these additions and improvements and as always if you have a comment or suggestions just send WebGirl or me (WebGuy) a Private Message.

Transitioning our Communities to BikeCliques

steven@bikeclicks.com — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 14:46:04 GMT

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 here on one site, you still need to poke you head in each community to see what’s new.

So, what we’ve been working toward for a long time is a merging of both sections, all of their functionality and some new functionality into one brand new, easy to use, full featured answer. The new BikeCliques can be easily created by any member within a few steps and will contain full featured forums, photo & document uploads, notes, post links, keep track of members, invite new members, etc. You can even send out invitations to your buddies or teammates so they can join in too. Any, if you are planning some super secret takeover of the Summer Racing Series with your teammate don’t worry you can make your Clique private to the outside world and invite members by invitation only.

Getting from here to there will require that things get a little doubled up on around here. Since we already have active Cliques and Communities and this new stuff is truly new and not an upgrade to what is already there we need to run for a few days or so in sort of a mixed mode while we convert the existing cliques into the new system and then focus on bringing the community forums over next. So this is the plan:

Disable existing Bike Cliques. Because we’ll be converting these over (the clique and it’s membership) we want to make sure this is not a moving target. So we’ll be disabling the existing cliques later today. Don’t worry….you new click will be setup for you. All you need to do is ….well nothing. We’ll email clique admins directly when the transition has been made later this week.

Launch new Bike Cliques. Next we’ll go ahead and launch the new BikeCliques features. Once live you’ll be able to setup your own “new” cliques using the wizard. If you already have an existing clique however you don’t need to do anything as we’ll be converting it for you.

Convert Communities into Cliques. Once the new Bike Cliques are live, we’ll be setting up new cliques for each of the current communities and then converting the forums and membership into them. Membership is a little tricky. Currently, we plan to create a list of everyone who has posted in that community and automatically make them a member of that communities' new clique. This will ensure that members still has access to information they had before and can see what is going on in a specific clique form there new personalized homepage. If a member decides they don’t want to participate anymore – they can simply leave the clique.

Convert Profiles. Last, we’ll be converting your avatars and friends to the new profile features. Again, we plan to make this transition transparent and automatic so you won’t need to do anything.

Re-Purpose Communities. This part is a little unclear right now but the current plan is to re-purse parts of the existing communities into a general forum and make it part of our new member support section. We have some other ideas too but we’ll post up those options later on.

Again, we’re excited about what these changes mean for members and the website and can’t wait to get to the other side. This step in particular will represent a very noticeable disruption in the website while we make the switch so we wanted to make sure everyone who’s interested knew what the plan was and why we’re making this change. We appreciate you patience during this process. We’ll try and make it as painless as possible.

New Member Profiles

steven@bikeclicks.com — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 03:09:35 GMT

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

Upload your own Photos

Share Links with friends

Upload Documents

RSS Feeds pull information in form your favorite feeds

Keep Track of Friends

See Your Posts in one place

Easily link to all of of your BikeCliques

Connect to your other networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Show your blog posts on your profile

more to come….

You can manage your account much more easily now too. Your avatar, profile information, time zone, everything is much more easily managed with the new profile. Click on the photo thumbnail to see a larger view of what the new profile looks like.

New Features for BikeClicks.com

steven@bikeclicks.com — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 03:53:45 GMT

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.

The biggest improvement we’ll be making is the merging of BikeCliques and Communities. Right now we have both; members can create new cliques, but they basically only keep track of members and have a simple comment wall. Communities have full featured forums, but they don’t keep track of members or allow you to upload photos, comment on other items, etc. So, with the new features, the Communities section will go away and all of the current forums will become new BikeCliques (or merge into their existing BikeCliques)

Before you get worried about this change, let me tell you the good news. All of the forum functionality (and some new forum functionality) will be there for you within these new BikeCliques.

We’re also adding a “wall” or “jounal” that allows you to post comments, notes, RSS Feed, Links to Sites, Photos and more. Cliques will now allow members to “join” and keep track of members so you can get in touch with other members who are interested in the same type of cycling and interests as you.

But the best news is that members will be able to create their own Cliques now. So, let’s say you have a small cycling team of a group of people you like to ride with all the time. Or, you manage an entire cycling club, in a few simple steps you’ll be able to setup a BikeClique, complete with forums (we call them discussion or conversations by the way), upload a logo, write a description, make you group public or private or invitation only and invite your friends.

Attached are some screenshots of the new "KyMBA BikeClique” on our test server so you can begin to see what we’re talking about.

In later phases we’ll be adding BikeClique Calendars so you can organize your rides or events along with Media Galleries for Photos and Videos. We even will eventually integrate with other popular social networks and tools like Facebook and Twitter so you can update BikeClicks.com from there…or update those networks form BikeClicks.

Next time I’ll post up some details on the expanded user profiles along with some more details on this new functionality.

Sneak Peak - BikeClicks.com Safe Rides Map

steven@bikeclicks.com — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 16:53:44 GMT

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 of angry drivers? Or know that an intersection you commute through every day has had 49 “near misses” in the last year and a half? What about that pack of dogs that chases down cyclists on the club rides or the abundance of angry drivers yelling at cyclists downtown?

Well we’re happy to report that soon you’ll be able to see all of this information, nearly presented to you on a Google Map right here on BikeClicks.com. We’ve created a database our members can use to log issues they encounter out there on our streets and then easily view the results on a mash up of Google Maps, Street View and a BikeClicks.com Tool to deliver an easy to use, simpler to see solution so that your next ride is a safer one.

Check out the video we posted introducing Safe Rides by clicking on the screenshot on the left side of this post.

Photo Tagging

steven@bikeclicks.com — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:43:43 GMT

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:

Getting the Most from BikeClicks Community Forums

steven@bikeclicks.com — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:43:25 GMT

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.

click image to enlarge

Forum Controls

These control allow you to manage your view of an entire forum. Here are the main features and what they do:

Unanswered lists all of the topics started in a forum without any response. This is especially useful to admins or group managers
Not Read lists all of the topics in a forum which have not been read yet
My Forum shows you a summary of all of the topics you started or posted in.
Active Topics shows you a view of all new posts made since the last time you visited the site. This is very useful to keep up with the latest activity in one easy view.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions allow you to receive emails on a specific topic or forum. To receive emails when people update topics or post in forums just check the ‘Email me when someone replies to this thread.’ checkbox on the topic or forum to start receiving emails. To stop receiving emails on a topic or in a forum, simple uncheck this checkbox.

Poster Information

Member Avatar is a photo of each member. You can view a member’s profile by clicking on their avatar.
Private Messages clicking on the “Send Message” icon allows you to send a private message to that user. Perfect for contacting someone “off list” without giving out your email address.
Posts/Rank as you post more in any of the forums on BikeClicks your rank will increase. This is a useful tool for understanding how active a member is on the website.

Post Edit Controls

These controls allow you to manage the posts within a specific topic.

Edit allows you to edit your own post. This will only show on your posts.
Quote allows you to select another topic and “quote” it. Clicking this automatically captures that topic and begins a new post automatically.
Reply allows you to reply to a specific topic.
Alert is used to report any posts that you feel need attention from the site Administrators. Typically, this is used to report posts that don’t meet site policies, contain inappropriate content or language or could be considered spam.

HOW TO: Register and Access Team Forums

steven@bikeclicks.com — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 03:43:18 GMT

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 this page here.
Once you are on the registration page, complete the form and click the “Register” link at the bottom.
Registration is immediate. Once you click the register button (assuming you have no errors on your registration) you’ll be returned to the homepage of the site and your name will appear in the top right side of the page where the “Register” link was previously.

A note on email addresses: Make sure to use an email address that we can access. Also, you might want to add BikeClicks.com to your “safe senders” email list in your email client to make sure emails from the site don’t end up in your “Junk Mail folder. This is important since you can subscribe to specific forums and topics on BikeClicks so if you want to track posts about something specific, let’s say rides, or practices then the site will send you updates automatically.

Step Two: Access Your Profile

OK, so no you are a member of BikeClicks and you want to see your team’s community. Your team manager should have given you an RSVP Code. This code “unlocks” access to your team’s community. To enter this code you will need to access your membership profile.

To access your profile, click on your name in the upper right corner of the site. This will show your profile information
Now, click on the “Manage Services” link at the top of your profile information. This page shows you which roles you currently belong to on BikeClicks.com and allows you to enter a new RSVP Code

Step Three: Enter Your RSVP Code

This is the last step in the process. Again, your team manager should have given you an RSVP code already. Treat this code as a password and don’t share it with anyone else as it is the only way BikeClicks.com knows to unlock your specific community.

Enter your RVSP code in the text field provided
Click Subscribe

Now check under the Communities menu, you should see your team’s name in there now. To access your team’s community, click on your team’s name. That’s it, your in!