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, 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?).