Go Clipless

Cruising in NJ

I'm on the first leg of a four family stint in New Jersey. Thought I'd be sans bike for almost a week, but was pleased to find that my brother-in-law, Alexander (14), got a new chopper style cruiser.

We found a hex wrench to tighten up the nearly three foot tall handlebars and took it for a spin.

After a while the circulation begins to drain from the hands. Still a fun diversion!

Did you get any cool bike related gifts?

One of my friends gave me this most excellent bottle opener made from a bike chain and gear ring.

It's from Resource Revival, a company that makes unique gifts from recycled bicycle parts and other material. They've got some cool items for the office like a business card holder, picture frames, and clocks. I also like the CD holder made with chain ring spacers.

The company also sells wholesale to businesses and custom engraves promotional items so if you've got a bike shop and need some unique merchandise or are promoting a cycling event you should check them out.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share. She also gave me some beer on which to test the bottle opener. I'll post up about that as well in a few days.

Meanwhile, did you get any cool bike related gifts? Leave a comment or post up on your blog so we can see who got the coolest bike gift of them all!

Bicycling - the Whopper of bike magazines

Most magazines - in just about any industry - have become nothing but a mouthpiece for the companies in the industry they cover. They churn out little more than re-worked press releases and soundbites from the promotional material provided to them by advertisers and other interested parties. The magazine industry has become "flame-broiled."

"Only one drink each at the office Christmas party"

Any other good captions for this one?

This seems to be going around the e-mail joke world, of which I almost never participate. However, a friend of mine sent this to me today and I thought it was funny and worth sharing.

Not necessarily bike related, but I do have a beer category so I thought I'd make it fit.

The problem with your LBS

Why do my local bike shops suck so much?

Don't get me wrong...I love them. If I've got some spare time and I'm not riding, I'm probably visiting one of my LBS's. But individually, they suck. It would take a good 10 - 12 of my local shops combined to come close to the ideal bike dealer. And even then it would come up short.

So what's wrong?

NYC transit strike's got nothing on cyclists...

Go ahead and strike...you won't deter these riders.

The blog went down!

TypePad, the blogging service that I use, has been highly erratic over the past two months. Apparently the service is growing so fast that they outgrew their capacity and had to secure new servers and hosting facilities. Evidently the new servers are not very reliable as the service went down for almost the entire day. If you have visited today, you have been looking at a replica and not the real thing.

Not only that, but the server crashed so hard that they had to use a backup of the blog from several days ago. As a result, posts, comments, and trackbacks that happened during this time disappeared. They have since restored the site and all appears to be working now.

I'm generally happy with TypePad, but they really need to work on service reliability. I have been keeping my eye on other services in case I have to make a switch at some point, but none have compelled me to jump ship just yet.

I will, however, make a backup of the blog. Suddenly the need to do this has risen to new heights, I mean, there's a lot of sweat equity in these here pages.

So what about you, fellow bike bloggers? Are you happy with your blogging service? Do you have a backup of your blog? Would it matter if your blog was wiped off the face of the earth and you had to start over from scratch?

Booth Babes Unclipped - Holly

OK, here it is....the first Unclipped Booth Babe, Holly.  This is your chance to get to know a little about some of the girls aside from their pictures.  As if they weren't already hot enough, getting to know these girls a bit more personally will surely tip the scales and bring out the true votes.  And now, without further verbosity, I give you, Holly.....

Talk about cool, Holly couldn't wait to spread out on the table for some fun shots.  By far one of the most creative and exciting shoots of the day.  She also makes super cool jewlery!!  Check it out at www.laughingmango.com. Order soon so it can be shipped in time for xmas...or Valentine's Day. Then go vote for her.   

Sporadic

Sorry for the (more than usual) sporadic posts. On Friday I came down with some sort of stomach virus that knocked me on my ass for three days (details of which I will spare). Still not 100%, but I've got my strength back.

Meanwhile, I've got a couple of hundred posts to read stored up in my rss reader so I'll be back to commenting on your stuff soon. I'll probably need a day or two more before I get anything of real substance back up here so I hope you'll bear with me. I've got work and family stuff to catch up on before I work on the blog.

Speaking of working on the blog...I usually have some extra time around the holidays to just fool around a bit. I'm thinking of shaking some things up regarding the sidebar content on this site and maybe do a little housecleaning/reorganizing. Things are getting a little hairy around here and I'm looking to simplify a bit.

I'm taking suggestions! What stays? What goes?

Bike Blogosphere Tag Cloud

I've been fooling around with tag clouds. Trying to learn what they are all about. Their purpose - usefulness or lack thereof. I built a bicycle blog tag cloud to see if it would be a useful way of perusing the hot topics being talked about in the bike blogosphere. You know, just kind of track the buzz, which is really the whole point of a tag cloud anyway.

Ok, now try it out and then skip down below for some of my thoughts.

The tag cloud was developed using a service called, what else, TagCloud. Now the tag cloud is supposed to be something that changes regularly so by the time you read this it may be vastly different from when I last reviewed it for my comments.

First of all, it seems that Velorution and Surly Blog dominate the tags. I'm not exactly sure why this is. I fed the service an OPML file that included over 100 blogs including all of the blogs in my blogroll. I think the service may need a few days to cache the posts from blogs that have not already been added to its database. The only reason I believe this may be true is because I tried to do a Go Clipless tag cloud which took almost a week to populate. (There is a reason this service is still in beta).

I removed all of the news services I track as they often have redundant stories which too heavily skewed the tags to particular topics. Plus, I am more interested in tracking the conversation then the news itself.

I wonder how the tags are actually generated. I am surprised that there are no references to 29ers or singlespeeds. I know these terms come up regularly so I have to assume that the service is evaluating the words in the post against a list of pre-defined tags or keywords. It doesn't seem to add new tags so I wonder is there some master editor at TagCloud that is sitting there updating tags every so often?

The service only seems to offer up to six results for anyone tag. There is no next page for additional stories that it matches. Also, it doesn't seem to highlight the tags occurrence in the excerpt it provides so sometimes you have to read the whole article to see why it was selected.

Anyway, once more of the blogs I've selected are spidered by TagCloud it should get more useful. Play around with it a little and let me know what you think. Are these things useful or just more Web 2.0 bullshit hype?