Category Archives: Bike Blog Admin

YouTubed and Mobile Again

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Just a quick update to let you know about some recent improvements to this website.

The first update has to do with the Bike Trail Videos that I have posted on this website. Back in the summer of 2009 I video taped (yes, taped on 8mm tape back then) 9 bike trails, northwest of Chicago, and edited and compiled videos of the trails with descriptive titles and an original music background.

I believe that these bike trail videos are longer (usually around 12 minutes) and more complete than a lot of the other bike trail video snippets that I have seen online since I took the videos while riding the trails and I tried to get highlights of most parts of each trail that the video is about.

Unfortunately, the videos are from 4 years ago and the camcorder that I used for them was even fairly old at the time (not HD) so, although the content is very complete, the videos use an older, now fairly obsolete technology. Also, since I took most of the videos while riding they are pretty shaky too (although I did get a little better at that over time). I hope to upgrade to a helmet cam soon but these videos were done the old school way.

The good news is that I have just moved all of these videos to my new YouTube Channel, AboutBicyclesFitness, and the YouTube versions have been stabilized (to reduce the shake factor) and can easily be played on multiple devices.

I also thought that the original video soundtracks were pretty boring (the sound of the tires on crushed stone, bike noises and some birds in the background) so I added an Original Music Soundtrack to each video. I didn’t want to run into any copyright problems so I used some music that I had written and recorded myself many years ago when I was going through my songwriter phase.

The original recordings also had words and vocals but I removed that track since I just wanted background music (and my vocals and lyrics were not that good anyway 🙁 ). The songs were also recorded with older technology so they are not as good as you could get these days. Anyway, you can just mute the audio if you don’t care for the music.

I have left the bike trail videos, in their original Flash format, on this site (see our Bike Trail Videos page for the Flash versions) but have refered our visitors to the YouTube version for more versitile and better quality versions. It made more sense to keep these videos exclusively on this site so many years ago, but it makes more sense to have them on YouTube now since YouTube is the major site for videos and they have all the latest and greatest technology.

Mobile Again!

about-bicycles new responsive design format

about-bicycles new Responsive Design, Mobile Format

The next update has to do with the Mobile Friendly Version of this website. Back in August of last year, I converted this website to a liquid, mobile friendly responsive design format.

Basically, this means that when you view this website on a mobile device (such as a smart phone or tablet computer) the webpages on this site will fit that device properly and will be reduced to one column, as needed, to avoid having to pinch the screen wider and/or having to scroll from side to side to see the entire page.

If you view a page on this site (including the blog) on a regular, full sized (pc) screen then reduce the width of the browser window, you will see the text begins to wrap to fit the screen and when you hit the smart phone size you will see it convert to one column.

I believe the responsive design format to be the best technology at this time and, although many of the biggest sites on the internet still do not use this format, it is a widely accepted newer technology and many sites are moving in that direction (Wikepedia for example).

Getting back to the Mobile Version of this website, I had some traffic problems with Google right after installing the mobile version last year and backed out that update to rule out that it was not the cause of the traffic issues. The traffic problems actually had to do with the Google Panda and Penguin updates (I am still working on recovering from this update, like many other website owners and I still think that Googles search results have been degraded to some degree with these updates (see A Step Back for Google for more on this)).

So after I verified that the new mobile version of this site was not the cause of the traffic issues, I have reinstalled the new and improved mobile version of this website. For more information on the mobile, responsive design format used on this website see our About-Bicycles Has Been Mobilized post).

OK, so much for a quick update. Sorry about that. I hope I didn’t lose everyone with all the tech talk (geek speak?).

Deer Grove Orange Trail Conditions, about-bicycles updates…

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I was just out on the Orange Trail in Deer Grove yesterday and wanted to post an update on the condition of the trail since there were some downed trees. The Orange Trail is the old abandoned forest preserve road that they closed to automotive traffic. I actually remember many years ago when you could drive on what they now call a trail but that was quite a while ago. You get on this trail from the entrance off Dundee Road just east of Northwest Highway.

Fallen Tree in Deer Grove

The first tree over the Orange Trail

The Orange Trail is not very long (a little over a mile one way) but it is one of my favorite trails in Deer Grove and can be used to get from one trail (or road) to another. I walked the trail yesterday since I have been unable to ride so far this season due to an injury (my physical terrorist  🙂 has now given me permission to start riding short distances again so I should be back in the saddle again for this season soon).

Anyway, what I discovered yesterday is that there are 2 huge trees that have fallen on to the trail and I don’t believe that you can ride around them on a bike without stopping and either walking around or under them. The trail was also under water on one side in one of the ravines but you could still get by easily on the other side. The trees that were on the trail look like they fell over due to all the rain and flooding and the wet ground since you could see how their roots came out of the ground.

Flooding on Orange Trail in Deer Grove

The high water over some of the trail

They maintain the trails in Deer Grove pretty well (it’s a Cook County forest preserve) so I imagine that they will get out there and get these trees off the trail eventually but I don’t know how long it’s going to take them to get to it. So you just need to know that if you ride on this trail there are some obstructions that you’ll need to get around.

We have had a lot of flooding in the Chicago area this week so I was worried about flooding on the trails. This trail in Deer Grove was not bad but I know there has been flooding along the Fox River and the Des Plaines River so I’m sure parts of those bike trails are flooded too.

More fallen trees on Orange Trail in Deer Grove

The second fallen tree on the Orange Trail

The river does not have to be that high to flood the underpasses on the Des Plaines River Trail. I’ve seen that happen before as in the photos on this page.

About-Bicycles Updates

Sorry about the long time between posts here, I am usually much more active with this blog. Although we have not had the greatest riding weather recently, we have had a few good riding days but as I mentioned above I have had an injury that has prevented me from riding so far this season.

The main reason though that I have not been on schedule with my blog updates and have fallen a little behind on a few other updates to the site is because I am still trying to recover from the last Google Bashings that this site has had.

I have mentioned this before in some of my other posts but if you missed it we lost a large amount of traffic to this site with the recent Panda and Penguin updates from Google. We still rank higher in the Search Engine Results for Bing and in a lot of cases I have found the Bing results to be more relevant.

It seems to me that Google is ranking the popular super-sites on the internet higher on most search terms regardless of how relevant the specific results are. For example, you always see Wikipedia, You Tube, Amazon, TrailLink (for bike trails), Flickr (for photos), etc. even when they don’t match the specific term that you are searching for. Plus often you get multiple (like 10 or more) search results for the same website (let’s have some variety!).

OK, I could ramble on a lot more about Google’s degraded search results but I need to get back to the topic that I was originally discussing.

One of the penalties that you get with the Google Panda update has to do with “Thin Content” and I think there is a possibility that my bike trail photo pages may have inadvertently caused me problems in this area.

The bike trail photo pages on this site were designed simply to showcase the bike trail photos with very brief captions on most of the photos. Well, I discovered that we have about 250 photo pages on this site and most have very little content because they were designed that way.

No one really knows what the exact Google algorithm is for their search results (except for the people at Google) but I have read that pages with less than 300 words as content could get penalized by Google and if there are a large number of these on your site it could cause problems. Well I have a very large number of photo pages with very little content other than very brief captions.

So anyway, one of the main things that I have been working on is increasing the content on these pages so I am backtracking and adding much more commentary to all the bike trail photo pages and this has been slow and time consuming.

In some cases the additional content just looks like “fluff” but I have discovered that adding more verbiage does actually add more depth the the photos and articles and can be helpful too in many situations.

Well, I knew that this topic was going to be hard to explain and I’m afraid that this part of the post got longer than I intended.

For those of you who made it this far and were interested, I hope that this explains why there hasn’t been many blog posts recently and that I am still working hard to recover from the latest Google bashings so I can continue with more relevant and quality updates to this website.

A Step Back for Google

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This post is an update on the status and format of this website rather than my more usual posts on biking, bike trails and fitness.

Back in August of last year (2012) I spent about a month converting this website to a more mobile friendly format and posted that I completed the conversion on September 10th. The new mobile-ready format has been working fine especially on small mobile devices like cell phones since the display changes to 1 column.

Well, I have had some major issues with my website rankings with Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) starting about 3 weeks after my mobile updates to this site.

I actually highly suspect that the problem with the Google SERPs really has more to do with recent Google updates (Panda and Penguin) but I need to rule out that the changes to the mobile format did not have something to do with this problem.

Therefore, I must take a step back and convert the pages back to their original (less mobile friendly) format. I plan to do this update on Saturday Feb 9th. The pages can still be displayed on cell phones but you will need to zoom in to read them properly. This blog will remain in the more mobile friendly format.

I’ll need to give this at least a month to know if the formatting played a role in the search results problem. If I determine that the mobile format did not have anything to do with the issue then I can convert the site back fairly easily now.

Regarding the Google Panda and Penguin updates I am more convinced than ever that Google is now favoring big business and the largest and most popular Internet websites over any small business or individual website now.

Just check out the results that you get from Google now. Often I will get 5 or 10 listings of Amazon results (when searching for a product for example) or large numbers of  sequential YouTube and Wikipedia pages for other searches and I need to go to page 2 or 3 for something unique or a less biased page.

OK, well I may have more on that later but I thought that I would at least touch on it here since it relates to the update that I have planned for tomorrow. Sorry for any inconvenience that you may have with this (especially on cell phones).

About-Bicycles has been Mobilized!

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For those of you who have been looking for new bike trail updates (photos, videos), info on bike events or fitness products here is why I haven’t had a chance to add a lot of new content to the about-bicycles.com site or the Bike Blog recently.

I have just spent over a month doing a major conversion on this website to make it much more mobile-friendly. This website is well over 500 pages and I just installed the mobile changes yesterday.

about-bicycles new responsive design, mobile format

about-bicycles new mobile format

As we all know, mobile devices (smart phones, tablet computers, etc.) are everywhere now and I know that over 1/3 of the visitors to this website get here via mobile devices so I thought it was important to make the site more mobile-friendly (which it now is – the blog and the website).

For the more technical readers out there I have converted the site to a Responsive Design format (liquid) using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I may post a page on this site with more of the technical details at some point but I am a little burned out on it now and actually want to get back to the bike, bike trails and fitness stuff on the site again.

Just for a summary, the text and photos on the about-bicycles.com website will now adjust to fit whatever screen/view port/device that is accessing the website. This will be most noticeable on smaller devices such as smart phones although the display will also be a little nicer on tablet computers too.

When viewing this site on a typical desktop or laptop computer you will not notice much of a difference other than the links at the top of the page are now in boxes with rounded edges. If you re-size the width of your browser window, however, you can see how the content adjusts to the size of the screen. Once the screen is around 500 pixels or less it will convert to a one-column format which is how it will be displayed on smart phones and smaller devices.

Generally, when you access a website, that is not mobile-friendly, on a smartphone the device will try to display the entire page and it will be very small (mostly unreadable). You then need to pinch the screen to make the display larger and you will also need to scroll back and forth as well as up and down to view the content.

Old and New Responsive Design smartphone display

The Old (left) and New (right) smart phone website display

Mobile-friendly sites (such as about-bicycles.com now) will display at a more readable size and most will display in one column on a smart phone so you only need to scroll up and down to read the page. The photo on the right shows how this site looked on an iphone before and after the mobile conversion.

Although the liquid, responsive design approach is widely accepted and I believe it is a much better way to accommodate mobile website visitors, many of the biggest sites on the internet maintain separate web pages for mobile and desktop visitors. They also have larger IT resources to handle the additional maintenance and are not usually as responsive as smaller sites such as about-bicycles.com.

I need to make one note on the conversions. This site has quite a few bike trail pages, photos and videos and some of the older bike trail pages and photo pages have not yet been converted (it will be obvious when you land on one of those pages). I will be working on these pages next so they will all be converted very soon. Also the bike trail videos may not work on all mobile devices.

OK, sorry if that got a little long. It was a big project and difficult to summarize in a few sentences so I just did the longer version.

Anyway, like I said, I really hope to be able to get out and get some new bike trail photos and updates soon (fall can be a great time for bike trail photos) so stay tuned for some more actual cycling updates.

P.S.

I also saw the Tour of Elk Grove show on Comcast a week or so ago and the show was done very well and it was really nice to actually see everything that was going on during the 3 day event.

The show will be aired 3 more times this month and you can see the schedule on this post HERE . You can also see our update, photos and video of the TOEG here

Same About-Bicycles Blog ~ New Liquid Format for Mobile

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Old About-Bicycles Blog Format

Old About-Bicycles Blog Format

This is really just a technical note to let you know that I am converting the About-Bicycles Bike Blog to a new Responsive (or liquid) design format so that this blog will display much nicer on mobile devices such as smart phones, iPods, iPads and tablet computers.  So feel free to visit this blog on your smart phones and tablets!

Starting today you will be seeing a new theme for this blog (and there may be some minor changes during the update process) but don’t worry all of the existing content and information on this blog will still be here as it has been for so many years.

Since there are thousands of visitors to this blog each year (a little over 13,000 at last count (and I am humbled and grateful for your responses)) I wanted to be sure to post a notification that this is still the same About-Bicycles Bike Blog.

The photo that I have included above is how this site used to look with the previous (non-responsive, fixed width) WordPress theme (iNove).  The new WordPress theme that I will be using is just called Twenty Eleven. I have tested and implemented this new theme on one of my other (less popular) sites and it has most of what I need for a decent blog theme (although there are still some trade offs and other things that I would like to see).

This new WordPress Theme allows a banner photo on top and I searched for quite a while to find a good bike blog type of photo that works well in a long banner-like size and decided to just go with a background design for now.

Photo used for new WordPress theme

Photo used for new WordPress theme

I actually just started with a photo of a sunset with some high grasses in the foreground since I liked the colors. Then I blurred it out so I could include text in the foreground and re-sized it to fit the banner proportions. If you do not see the new banner yet then I have not completed the conversion just yet (it will be coming soon).

This is actually just Step One in the process of converting the entire About-Bicycles.com website to a more mobile friendly format. I have already completed most of the work necessary to convert this website to a Responsive Design (via CSS) but have not yet implemented the changes. This will be happening soon but there is only so much time in the day.

OK, I’ll be backing up this blog now before the conversion. After that you should see the new format. I hope you like it ~ on your Desktops, Laptops, Smart Phones, Tablets or any other device that you may use to access this blog. Later.

New Camera for Better Bike Trail Photos

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If you have been to the Bike Trail Pages on the about-bicycles.com website then you know that I have ridden, taken photos (and sometimes videos) and written trail articles on  quite a few bike trails (in the Chicagoland area and in Wisconsin).

New Camera for Bike Trail Photos

New Nikon D5100 for Better Bike Trail Photos

Well, I’ve been using my same old 5MP digital camera since 2005 and it was time for an upgrade so I just purchased a new Nikon DSLR!

I have actually been wanting an SLR camera for much of my adult life (and especially since Digital SLRs became popular) and since I am planning to get out on a lot of new bike trails soon, and there are also some bike events coming up soon ~ and also since the prices on these fantastic and powerful cameras how come down quite a bit now ~ the timing was right and I pulled the trigger on the purchase.

One of the reasons that selected this particular model is because it is a little bit smaller than the full size DSLRs, They classify this camera as a “compact DSLR” although it is still big compared to a point-and-shoot or even one of the new Superzoom cameras (which I was also looking into).

I know from lugging other cameras (and camcorders) out on the bike trails that the smaller sizes are a big plus. This camera is going to be a little more work to lug around (due to the larger size) but I have gotten used to carrying around  photo equipment on my bike and I think I should be able to adjust to it.

The photo above is a front and rear view of the camera that I just bought (of course). OK, so I photoshopped the daisy bike trail picture into the viewfinder. 🙂 I wanted to have a photo of the fully articulating LCD (the flip out view finder screen) so I included both views of the camera.

For my purposes I got this camera with a 18-200mm lens, which is a good multipurpose lens that can be used for close-ups as well as telephoto pics.

I suppose this might look like over-kill for bike trail photos that are mostly going to be viewed on the internet but there are a few good reasons why I upgraded to a high quality DSLR.

First, there have been a handful of times when people who write articles for magazines and hardcopy publications (see this blog post for details) have asked me if they could use photos from this site for their articles. Most of the time the only full size photos that have to send them are from my 5MP camera and often they do not meet the necessary requirements for hard-copy publications.

One of the other reasons for such a major upgrade is just the photo quality. Even if the photos are primarily viewed on the internet, photos from DSLRs are generally just much better quality (even though I do not claim to be a pro photographer (or even close to one) and I can use all the help I can get).

Aside from bike trails, I am also planning to get out to some major bike events this year and wanted to be able to get some quality photos. For example the Bike The Ride event is coming up next weekend (I hope I have the camera by then ~ I ordered through Amazon and just took the free shipping option) if I can get up early enough for this event (and if it’s a nice day).

Also I am really looking forward to the Tour of Elk Grove which is coming up in August. You can find more details on these events at our Special Cycling Events Page.

Anyway, once the new camera arrives and I am able to get out on the bike trails (which will be real soon and I have a large list of trails for this year) and out to the various cycling events, you should start to see some better photos out here!

About-Bicycles Page and Blog Posts on Facebook

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About-Bicycles.com is Goin Social!

Yep, I finally launched the About-Bicycles.com business page on Facebook so for the many of you that have subscribed to this blog you now have another way to get our updates and read these blog posts.

The About-Bicycles Facebook Page.

The About-Bicycles Facebook Page.

Here’s a link to the new About-Bicycles Facebook page. This page is new so we really don’t have much content out there just yet, but there will be soon.

Also, if I did the setup correctly, these blog posts should automatically be posted to the About-Bicycles Facebook page so if you choose to Follow About-Bicycles on Facebook, you can get our blog posts right there in Facebook instead of visiting us here on our website ~ of course, you are always welcome to come out here as often as you like too :-).

I have also setup this blog to be tweeted via our Twitter account About_Bicycles.

So come on out to the  About-Bicycles Facebook page and “Like” us and Follow Us! Let’s get social!

400 State Trail Wisconsin, October Ride

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Riding season is not over yet!

As a matter of fact, this is actually a really nice time of year, here in the Chicagoland area (and in Wisconsin), for bike riding.

A friend and I have just returned from an excellent bike ride that we did on the 400 State Trail in Wisconsin. It is pretty much peak season for fall color in this part of Wisconsin so if, by some chance, you are able to plan a ride in the south-western part of Wisconsin (not far from the Dells) I would highly recommend the 400 State Trail.

Both of us took quite a few photos while we were out on the 400 Trail and, as usual, I have uploaded all of our photos, selected and formatted the best and most relavant bike trail photos and have posted a full Bike Trail Article (with photo pages) on this site for this trail.

The new Bike Trail information  and photos can be found on our New 400 State Trail Pages. A view of a rock formation and lake along the 400 State Trail

I have actually been wanting to ride this trail for years now since I had already ridden (and photographed) the Elroy-Sparta Trail and my friend has contributed bike trail articles and photos of the other 2 bike trails, the Lacrosse River Trail and the Great River Trail that make up this series of connecting bike trails (referred to as Bike 4 Trails, in Wisconsin).

The 4 connecting trails go from Reedsburg, Wisconsin (on the south east end) to the Mississippi River (around Lacrosse, Wis) and north along the Mississippi to just past Trempealeu Wisconsin for a total of 101 miles (one way)!

For our trip, we just did an easy ride on the 400 State Trail from Reedsburg to Elroy and back for a total of 44 miles. Although we just did the 400 Trail on this trip, I now have complete trail pages and photos for all 4 of these bike trails on this site. If you check out the new 400 State Trail Article, there are links to the 3 other connecting trails on the main trail page.

It has actually taken me WAY longer than I thought it would to select and format all of the photos (I selected 49) and web pages for the trail article. I have been using almost the same format for my bike trail pages as I used when I first started this bike site and it is very time consuming.

Plenty of fall color on the 400 State Trail in Wisconsin

The good side to using the same format is that all of the trail articles and photo pages are consistent. The bad side is that it is cumbersome to use this format and there are probably newer and nicer formats out there. Well, at some point I will transition to a new format but for now, I hope you still enjoy the trail and photo formats that we’ve been using for years now.

So don’t give up on riding season yet! There is still some good weather and excellent rides to be taken!

2011 Best Buy Exercise Bike Updates

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Although some of the more serious riders use their exercise bikes and indoor cycles all year long, for many people it’s  the time of year that that they move their exercise routines outdoors and the exercise bike shopping season is slowing down quite a bit.

Fortunately, for those of you who are in the market for an exercise bike now, many of the exercise bikes for sale online are now selling at greatly reduced prices.

OK, so that may not be big news for many of you, what I did want to mention is that I just reviewed the Best Buy Exercise Bikes page on this site and have made some changes to reflect the better prices and more popular exercise bikes for 2011.

Many of the models on the about-bicycles.com Best Buy Exercise Bike Page are still selling at very good prices and are still very popular with the visitors to this site, but there have been some changes that were made for 2011.

Here are the Best Buy changes that have been made for 2011:

  • The Schwinn Active Series 10 upright bike has been replaced by the Schwinn 120 as the Best Upright Exercise Bike for Under $200.
  • I have created a new category for the Best Upright – Indoor Cycle Under $300 and moved the Proform 290 SPX into this category.
  • The Schwinn 230 Recumbent bike has been replaced by the Schwinn 220 Recumbent in the Best Recumbent Exercise Bike $300-$500 category.

With this being the start of prime riding season, I really want to get out there and check out some of the latest bikes that are out there (online and in the stores) but I have also just reviewed a few more exercise bikes, including the Schwinn A20 and Livestrong LS07.0B.

One of my good friends, and an expert in fitness equipment, has offered to set up a meeting for me with his contact at Johnson Fitness in Madison, Wis to visit the plant and personally review the Livestrong LS07.0B, since this is where the Livestrong bikes and exercise equipment is manufactured. I am looking forward to that and will post the updates here after my visit.      

For now, it’s a pretty decent spring day and time to get out for some riding!

About-Bicycles Bike Blog Registration Updates.

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This is just an administrative note on the About-Bicycles Bike Blog.

I must apologize to those who have registered to this bike blog with the intention of contributing to the blog. I had the default registration setup for “subscriber” rather than for “contributor”.

I believe that blog comments were still allowed but not new posts.

I have changed the default registration to “contributor”.  I believe that I will still need to approve new posts but I will see how that goes. At the moment, I do not get so much volume that I can’t handle the reviews and I do check the entries daily.

I am leaving the approval process in for now to avoid unwanted spam on the blog. I do have some spam filters but as we all know spammers do attempt to get their message out there to irritate the rest of us.

Anyway, I hope this new default registration role helps and please feel free to add comments. As long as the posts are legit bike related info and not spam or unethical, I will approve them quickly.