As the Wheels Turn

STR is in another growth spurt when it comes to traffic and new registrations. It’s not as big as the explosion of growth we had this past spring and early summer but it has still been noticeable. This is just another testament to what an awesome community we are a part of.

However, it has placed extra load on the server that hosts SocalTrailRiders.org resulting in occasional slow-downs and has even brought the site down for a few minutes at a time. Along with the stress this brings me it also makes me frustrated. I want the people that use STR to have a pleasant experience - me included.

The hosting switch/upgrade I plan to do will cost almost four times more then what it currently costs to host STR. This will hopefully make STR faster and more reliable then it has ever been.

Look for this to happen in the next couple weeks or so. If the migration goes over super smooth you might not even be able to tell. If the migration runs into a few bumps in the road then expect there to be some down-time - maybe up to a day.

UDPATE: Migration will occur on Friday, December 1 2006 at 11 am.

I finally got around to fixing the little IE ‘goofs.’ I took a break from eating (it’s thanksgiving!), opened up my Windows laptop and started coding away. So for you IE users - STR should look a little nicer now.

IE doesn’t handle web styles in a standards compliant way - forcing developers (me) to introduce hacks into our code to ‘fix’ IE’s implementation. I strongly encourage IE users to switch to Firefox. It’s safer and standards compliant. There’s a link to the Firefox download on the right side of this blog.

Time to celebrate the second birthday of SocalTrailRiders. The actual birthday is Monday, Novemeber 27th, 2006. We’ll have the birthday dinner on Sunday, November 26th at 7:00 pm at the YardHouse in the Irvine Spectrum.

Please check this thread for details and up-to-date information.

I’ll rundown a few other minor changes made to the forums and touch on a somewhat controversial addition to STR.

Minor Changes

• Background of photo pages in gallery are now a gray instead of teal color
• “Posting Rules” box which are the ones that say things like “you may post. you may create threads, etc” is now collapsed by default. Figured people rarely looked at this and it was just taking up space.
• Small CSS mishandling by Safari was fixed. The panoramic photo in the header would stretch all the way to the right and not be confined by the borders. One line of code fixed this.
• Guests now see a new ad. The first post of every thread now contains an ad for people who are unregistered or not logged in. Logged in users don’t see this ad.

Road forum added

Recently there have been ‘roadie’ threads spread out throughout the forums. Soon thereafter the roadies began to ask for their own forum. And they got it.

Yes, it’s true. SocalTrailRiders now has a roadie forum! I never envisioned STR having a roadie forum when I first built this site two years ago. However, I believe that the site has evolved and is as dynamic as any other community. The mountain bikers who also road ride made themselves heard and it was clear that there would be more roadie threads in the future.

Many argue to keep STR small. They believe that there isn’t enough activity to dilute the posts between even more forums. To a certain extent they are right. So I decided to come to this compromise:

• Ladies of STR was deleted
• Girls Club, a private girls-only forum, was kept
• The Roadie Hangout was added

This accomplished a few things. First, we got rid of the Ladies forum which was getting very little activity. I decided to keep girls club so that girls can still have a place for those women-only topics. The private girls club is not viewable by anyone else; this means that the deleting of Ladies of STR and the addition of the Roadie Hangout forum cancel each other out in terms of number of forums. And last but not least, all the present and future road-related threads will be kept off of the rest of the forums. This should make most everyone happy (I hope).

Forums Get a New Look

The forums now have a similar style to the rest of the forums and at the risk of sounding cocky - it looks damn good!

I found the direct compliment of the darker brown that was used on the rest of the website and it turned out to be a blue/teal’ish color. I really like how it accents the brown. Most of the rest was kept neutral, either gray or black. Link have an orange hover state.

Long Time Coming

I’ve wanted SocalTrailRiders.org to have a consistent look and feel throughout the website for a long time now.

The old design, with it’s bar on the left and vertical navigation, didn’t lend itself to well to having a forum style created out of it. This created a big problem as I couldn’t simply style a header and footer template but would have had to customize many templates, found a way to style those with the same CSS as the rest of the website, and it just would have been a big mess.

I created the V3 redesign with this in mind. That’s why I included horizontal tabs, a rectangle header section, and a consistent footer. This enabled me to easily adapt the design to a forum style. Luckily it worked out well.

One More Thing . . .

Created a DVD case and sweet cover for the STR Volume 1 DVD. People who get one tomorrow at the Blackstar/Motorway ride will get a treat!

Enjoy!

Early Notice

So I’m writing this before the redesign is even up. If you’re reading this before the big change happened, well consider yourself special.

STR Design History

This is the second redesign of SocalTrailRiders. However, the first redesign was more of a behind the scenes change. The look and feel of the website remained relatively the same as it did in November of 2004 when SocalTrailRiders was born.

Comments on the Redesign

For the new redesign I have gone with a darker and bolder brown and the “STR” acronym for SocalTrailRiders is emphasized more - especially in the logo.

Every once in awhile the image banner next to the logo will change. Keep an eye out for that.

I’d like to thank Bret (i am dino) for his constructive criticism throughout this redesign process. He’s better at making things pretty and some elements of the redesign were his idea. Thanks!

Some Stuff is Gone

The following has been omitted in the redesign:

• News
• Rider Profiles
• Articles

The big reason for these being gone is that they wouldn’t be updated and would get stale very quickly. I could sit here and promise weekly updates of news/rider profiles AND a new article every week but the reality is that I’m still a full time college student with friends, a part time job, and a mountain biking addiction.

Look for an archive of some sorts for old news items and articles in the near future though.

Forums Will Also Get a New Look

Soon the forums will default to a new style which will resemble the redesigned stuff. I’ll probably keep the old styles as an option, but don’t hold me to that. Let me know ASAP how you feel about it.

Some Technical Jargon

The first redesign introduced a website that was fully CSS and XHTML compliant and that tradition carries on with this redesign. The layout and design is achieved purely through the magic of Cascading Style Sheets. A fluid layout was used (as opposed to fixed) which means it should look solid on a variety of different screen resolutions and browser window sizes.