velospace blog

Technical issues on velospace have cropped up recently, and not so recently, and I realize how frustrating they can be.

velospace now uses Twitter for status updates

Twitter is a simple text update service. It is a valuable tool because it allows users to add content using a variety of inputs: web based control panels, cell phone text messages, and so on.

I am using Twitter for velospace status updates in order to improve communication about technical issues going on with the site. The three most recent messages are displayed on the side column of the blog and you can follow along on Twitter at https://twitter.com/velospace.

If you have any questions or suggestions let me know.

- Greg

velospace upgraded a few days ago to a more powerful server and some issues have popped up with regards to thumbnails and photos not syncing up. The following is a quick two-step process to fix the photos in the mean time while a site-wide solution is worked on.

To fix mismatched thumbnails do the following:

1. Log-in to velospace
2. Click on “my stuff”
3. Click on your bike that is having thumbnail issues
4. Click “edit” at the top of the screen
5. On your computer, rename the photos
6. Put these photos in the edit screen on #4
7. …
8. Upload and profit!

I will write up a post discussing the server upgrade and the cause of the thumbnail issues. For the time being, renaming and reuploading your photos will solve the problem.

As always, contact me with any questions.

Best,

- Greg

I am a big believer in competition, people will use the best service available.

The Bicycle Social Networking Scheme is Getting Busy

When I started velospace in December 2005 there was no social networking site dedicated to bikes. Fixed Gear Gallery has been around forever, but it is not a social networking site - its a photo album with a message board tacked on.

velospace is the leader in bicycle social networking. We paved the road for the sites that followed and are far more successful than anyone else in this area because of what we offer.

The past two and a half years have seen a gradual increase in bike related social networking sites. I have kept tabs on them to see what they are doing, how they are doing it and whether they are doing it better than I am. Who are the players?

• Bicycle Room - little to no activity, 29 bikes total, stale.
• BikeSpace - been in “alpha” since it launched a year ago, couple hundred bikes, no sign of life from the developers.
• MyByk - brand new, marketing centric, social - networking - meets - focus - group, active developers and a former promoter (who has since moved on) with a column in Road Magazine.

So whats worth looking at? Bicycle Room appears to be dead. BikeSpace appears to be dormant on the development end, but getting a trickle of user activity. MyByk is too new to know what sort of reception they will get, making it the site most worth taking a look at.

MyByk sez it “will be the most comprehensive online community for all segments of the cycling market upon launch” and that “leading bicycle manufacturers, dealers and advocates have been actively involved in shaping MyByk and tuning its functionality to complement their efforts.” Bicycle Newswire.

Reading between the lines, and looking at what MyByk is currently offering, its pretty obvious that they are designing their site as a front end for advertising to get pushed out to bikers. This petri dish has users as the specimens and bicycle brands as the observers. The site already has “Featured Brands,” “Featured Products,” and no less than 5 advertisements on the homepage; not bad for a site with less than 25 users.

It will be interested to see how MyByk evolves and to see what advertisers they Josh Kadis can get on board (Ritchey is the only early adopter as of now but Kadis has been hawking the site in Road Magazine, at Interbike and presumably behind the scenes as well) can get on board, what their draw is for users, and how the hyper-advertising model works out. I’ll repeat the first 14 words of this post here - I am a big believer in competition, people will use the best service available.

Ed. note, 7/8/08: Kadis contacted me and related that his affiliation with MyByk ended in January of 2008, updated post accordingly.

Competition benefits users. They are the reason why all of these sites exist. The inevitable outcome of competition amongst ourselves vying for attention from the same pool of users is that everyone will have to keep improving to capture users’ attention.

Ideas or comments? Send me a note!

- Greg, velospace.org

velospace is home to over 7,000 bikes today!

It is May 3, 2008 and velospace has crossed the 7,000 bike mark. Just four months ago we crossed the 5,000 bike mark. That is 2,000 + bikes in just four months. AMAZING!

- Greg

velospace is a vibrant community of over 10,000 bikers today!

April 12, 2008 velospace crossed the 10,000 user threshold. WOW! An amazing accomplishment - an enormous thanks to each and every one of the 10,000 bike riders who have made velospace the best bicycle community.

See also

• Two Year Anniversary
• 5,000 Bikes!

- Greg

Adding bikes to clusters is now as easy as clicking one button!

Until today adding bikes to clusters on velospace was a laborious process, you had to copy down the bike’s URL, click over to the velospace cluster control panel and click a few more buttons to get a bike in. I realized how inefficient this process was and fixed it.

Now every bike page has a “Cluster Mgmt” panel on the side column. There is a drop down box with all your cluster names and an “Add” button. Line up the cluster you want the bike to go into and add away. Couldn’t be easier!

I am planning on moving other features over to the side column as time goes on to help simplify the bike content layout. As always if you have any questions drop me a line.

- Greg

velospace now has community moderation!

Moderation flags let you help keep velospace a thriving open community

As the site approaches the 10,000 user mark the number of bikes and comments have also grown by leaps and bounds. The flood of content coming into velospace is hard to keep up with as a one-man show. My goal with velospace is to foster a community of respect and admiration for bicycles. In order to accomplish this goal I have set out some basic rules, discussed on the velospace blog previously. Some recent activity on the site had me thinking about how to manage the drinking-from-the-fire hose-feeling I have when trying to keep tabs on whats happening.

Problem: Too Much Information, Solution: Get People Involved

As a social networking site, velospace exists because of the enthusiasm of its users. To help turn the fire hose of information into a more manageable trickle of info, I have coded up some Community Moderation tools.

Basically, all logged-in users are able to flag a bike or comment on a bike as “spam”, “prohibited”, or “not a bike.” The links for flagging appear on each bike page and only require a single click. These flags are collected and stored in the velospace database. Think of it as a modified Craigslist moderation scheme. The flags are analyzed by moderators and actions will be taken when necessary. If you have any questions about what sort of content is not welcome on velospace take a look at the Rules, particularly Rule #1.

This tool gives users a direct say in the quality of the content on the site - if someone tries to lower the value of velospace by spamming the site, posting derogatory comments, or otherwise being a jerk - the community can raise its voice and be heard.

If you have any questions about this feature or any suggestions for its implementation let me know.

- Greg

What Happened?

velospace went down hard about a month and a half ago. The site was being hosted on a shared server with a few hundred other sites and at some point velospace took down the server. I have a sneaking suspicion that it was a misconfiguration with the server’s email system - a large number of user registration email addresses that were improperly entered were circulating in qmail and eventually it got to be too much. velospace was sucking up 99%+ of the server resources and crashing MySQL / Apache continuously so the plug was pulled on February 4, 2008.

Why Was the Site Unavailable for so Long?

The old host deactivated the site and I had to scramble to either try to: a) fix the problem in the short term and get the site back up on the existing host, or b) find a new host and hope that my hunch about the old host’s misconfiguration was correct. I did some research in 48 hours following the crash and decided to try Media Temple as a new host. Media Temple has a shared / clustered hosting environment that seemed to fit my needs, and as a bonus they have 24/7 phone support.

I got on a clustered hosting plan about three days after the crash and started to transfer over the velospace archive from the old host. The transfer took a few hours - the photos and site files were about 4GB of data and the database was about 2GB of data. I did a wget from the new server to the old server to save time from pulling the files down to my PC and pushing them back to the new server.

After transferring the files over I got to work on setting up the databases again, fixing a few absolute paths, making sure the new server had the watermarking software installed, and so on. I transferred the domain name over to the new host when I registered the account - this turned out to be a big mistake.

Rather than point the existing velospace.org DNS records to the new host, I transferred the domain name to Media Temple as part of the hosting account creation process. It turns out that it can take up to a week for a domain ownership transfer to take place. I ran into a lot of road blocks trying to get transfer auth codes from my old host, waiting for the new host to approve the transfer, waiting for DNS to update, and so on. A week went by with velospace running on a server that no one could get to because the DNS ownership transfer went so damn slow - talk about frustrating! The site was down for 10 days.

Whats the Deal With the New Host?

I am going to reserve judgment on the quality of Media Temple until I have more experience with their service. The current plan I am on is billed on metered usage based on a blend of CPU and MySQL cycles. This billing model has forced me, in a good way, to optimize the site so that it is less resource intensive. When I go over my monthly allotment of resources I have to pay for what I use. So far I have been able to cut down on inefficient queries and streamline the site in a lot of ways. The end result is a faster website that should be able to scale in the long run.

Any Lessons Learned?

The best lesson I learned from all of this is to have a contingency plan in mind - I had to scramble and figure out what I was going to do because the site went down with no warning. I should have had a plan in mind before velospace got unplugged so I could get the site up and running within a day or two rather than a week or two.

If you have any questions or comments, drop me a line.

- Greg

As of 7:15PM CST on Monday February 4, 2008 velospace is down.

The site is down due to a spike in consumption of resources, why we aren’t sure. The database server is spiking and the server is hosed.

I’m working with my host to get the site back up or to get a backup of the site on a hard drive so it can be reconstituted on another server. Its looking like the site will be transferred to a new host - which means a delay of a few weeks minimum to get the data sorted out and working in a different environment.

Stay tuned for updates and feel free to contact me at pointdexterish+velospace@gmail.com

- Greg

I came across an interesting gadget in the velospace referrer logs tonight:

Random Bike from velospace created and hosted by robosauce.com. The gadget grabs a random bike from velospace, gets a photo and stretches it to full screen size. Reload for another bike, click to visit the bike profile. Cool!

Update: this is actually a Google Gadget. You can also add this Gadget to your web page.

Here is the Gadget:

I am always open to working with people on gadgets and extending features. If you have an idea and want to talk about implementing it, send me a note.

- Greg

velospace celebrates its two year anniversary this week. Its amazing to think that two years ago velospace launched with less than a dozen users, only a handful of bikes, and a bunch of big ideas.

Thanks to the people who have made velospace a success

Many, many thanks to everyone involved with the site. I’d like to thank my graphic designer Sean, the early adopters from Bike Forums, the people who made crucial suggestions, my web host NSI Hosting, the people who supported the site by either buying some merchandise or promoting the site by word of mouth, the people throwing alleycats who reached out to me for sponsorship, and most of all the people who use the site day in and day out - you guys are the lifeblood of the site and the reason that velospace is thriving.

Thanks to the people who contributed so much to velospace

The bikes, comments and clusters on velospace are a goldmine of content. Here are a few favorites:

A 105 years old bike: “1903 columbia track bike”.

The family that bikes together: “60s Schwinn Twinn Tandem”.

The coolest tall-bike, ever: “suspension bike”.

The flawless Japanese racing machine: “LeveL”.

The most bad ass beer hauling bike, includes Metallica records: “beerbus”.

The bike photo that always makes me smile: “thedogtourin”.

The bike autographed by a cycling legend: “Eddy Merckx Track Bike 1981″.

The delicious and impromptu drink recipes, great stories about being a kid on a bike, solid advice on winter bike commuting, super detailed explanations of how to wash a bike, and all of the other insightful, funny and memorable comments.

Bikes from every walk of life including the loaded touring rigs, to kids bikes, to downhill MTBs with 8 inches of travel, to super aero time trial rides, to the bikes that get people places day in and day out.

Clusters of bikes celebrating Chicago Schwinns, lowriders, one-of-a-kind rides, and loud paintjobs.

What I’m Getting At

The little bits and pieces I just linked to are a tiny thumbnail sketch of the amazing community that is velospace. A social networking site lives and dies by the quality of its users, and velospace is strong because of its amazing community.

By the Numbers

On Average…
Bikes: 7 bikes added per day, every day, for two years.
Users: 10 users joined a day, every day, for two years.
Comments: 17 comments added per day, every day, for two years.
Friends: 74 friends added per day, every day, for two years.

In Remembrance

I would also like to take a minute to remember velospace user Shiznaz, a rider from Toronto. He was killed in August of 2007 while riding his bike. A drunk driver hit and killed him. We remember you Charles, rest in peace.

Two Years Later

To sum up the past two years with a photo and a quote:

“The journey of life is like a man riding a bicycle. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. We know that if he stops moving and does not get off he will fall off.”

Mr. William G. Golding

- Greg

Today, December 4, 2007, velospace reached the 5,000 bike milestone! This is a massive accomplishment - my deepest gratitude goes out to the amazing community of riders who have made velospace the best place on the Internet to enjoy bikes.

One other thing to note is that this month marks the site’s 2 year anniversary (!!). Stay tuned, I am going to put together some numbers and stats to chart how the site has grown.

- Greg

velospace is a project/hobby of mine - it is not the main focus of my attention or energy. I set the site up to quietly run itself with minimal intervention. Things have worked out great the past two years: I haven’t had to spend an inordinate amount of time lording over the site to make sure it doesn’t get overrun by spammers, scammers, or jerks in general.

Social networking sites (SNS) are particularly vulnerable to spammers, scammers, and jerks because such sites must be open and easy to access by their very nature. In order to deal with this issue I’ve used several tools, one of which I am going to discuss today. One tool I’ve used to help steer clear of problems is a simple statement of rules on the about velospace page.

Why your SNS needs a simple site policy

Its inevitable that users of your SNS will butt heads and turn to you, the admin, for help resolving the problem. I’ve received many emails when spats between users boil over from comments-on-bikes to private-message-boxes to emails in my inbox. I realized that without some sort of overarching rules to reference when mediating disputes and keeping the site clean from spam, scams, and needless aggression would be close to impossible.

The velospace rules:

Rule 1. Don’t be a jerk.
Rule 2. Users only may contact one another for the sale or trade of bike-related items. No corporate sales. If you are a business and want participate on velospace you must contact Greg regarding advertising rates. velospace disclaims any and all liability and will not be liable in any way for the outcome of interactions between users.
Rule 3. No profanity in user names or the titles of sales, bikes or comments.
Rule 4. The only content you may upload to this site (including but not limited to images and text) is that which you either have a copyright in, permission from the copyright owner to upload, or work in the public domain.
Rule 5. You spam, you banned. Don’t bother trying!

Rule 1: The first rule I wrote is exceedingly simple. Four words, plain meaning, and its helped out a whole lot. This rule is absolutely necessary to maintain a level of decency between members. This is the anti-aggression rule.

Rule 2: The second rule is a bit more wordy, but is also simple and keeps spam and scams down. I don’t want velospace to be overrun by shills for products that may interest my users, but I want to give businesses a chance to reach out to users at the same time. I balanced these two interests by allowing businesses to participate in the site with my permission and only after having an advertising contract in place.

Rule 3: I try to keep profanity out of user names and titles of sales in the marketplace, bikes, and comments. I am not trying to censor users, I am trying to keep the site from reading like a bathroom wall for people who visit the site the first time and see what is posted on the front page. I have no problem with profanity in user profiles, comment bodies, bike descriptions, etcetera. But my reputation is reflected in the content of the site when I tell people that it is my project, and I expect a little bit of decency.

Rule 4: I wrote this rule after dealing with some content on the site that was uploaded by someone who obviously did not have a copyright to it. With the threat of litigation from copyright holders looming large these days (see RIAA/MPAA lawsuits galore), this rule makes it clear that velospace doesn’t condone copyright infringement on the site.

Rule 5: Another simple rule to deter spammers and scammers. I implemented the Drupal Troll module to deal out IP bans to repeat offenders, it works quite well.

In Sum

Each of these 5 rules covers a different type of bad behavior I’ve come across on velospace. By implementing these rules and holding users accountable to them I have been able to keep the site operating smoothly for over two years. If you have any questions about writing site policies that make sense please drop me a line!

- Greg

Back in April I broke down the bandwidth numbers for velospace. Here we are six months later, lets take a look at how things are going. First, the original bandwidth numbers:

Bandwidth per month, % growth over previous month

• May 2006: 20GB
• June 2006: 28 GB, 40%
• July 2006: 35 GB, 25%
• August 2006: 52 GB, 28%
• September 2006: 67 GB, 29%
• October 2006: 85 GB, 27%
• November 2006: 101 GB, 19%
• December 2006: 116 GB, 15%
• January 2007: 135 GB, 16%
• February 2007: 145 GB, 7%
• March 2007: 186 GB, 28%

And here are the numbers since the last update - from April through September:

Bandwidth per month, % growth over previous month

• April 2007: 214 GB, 14%
• May 2007: 232 GB, 8%
• June 2007: 254 GB, 9%
• July 2007: 288 GB, 12%
• August 2007: 341 GB, 16%
• September 2007: 350 GB, 3%

Things are going very well as you can see by the percentage growth over the previous month. Bandwidth consumption continues to grow steadily at around 10% over the previous month, and at much much larger rates over the previous three, six, and twelve months.

Its exciting to see the site continue to grow and mature. On a photo sharing site like velospace it is no surprise that bandwidth numbers are high, the site is highly trafficked because people want to see bikes. If you have any questions or comments don’t hesitate to drop me a note.

- Greg

Back in July I mentioned that I was going to experiment with Google Adsense. Here we are three months later and I have to say that I am pleased with the results.

As I mentioned in my previous post, advertising on velospace used to consist of contracts made directly with individual advertisers on a case by case basis. It took a great deal of time to get advertisers up and running on the site. velospace is a one man shop, and this system was burdensome.

I also mentioned in my previous post that I had held back from using Google Adsense because I did not believe that there was enough relevant ad stock to attract the interest of velospace users. I had a feeling that running Google ads on the site would cheapen the user’s experience by plastering the site with ads that had nothing to do with biking.

The good news is that I was wrong! The past three months have totally changed my point of view on the quality of the Adsense ad stock. Observing the ad copy on the site and seeing the revenue numbers, I can truthfully say that Adsense has been able to address the niche that velospace occupies. Click through rates and interest in the ads has been growing each month, and the corresponding revenue is helping me keep the site online.

Do you run a niche website? Are you curious about how you can generate some passive income? Worried about a lack of relevant advertising? I would suggest giving Google Adsense a try, you may be surprised! If you have any questions or thoughts about Adsense or other advertising ideas, drop me a line.

-Greg

Putting Your Brand On Merch Makes Sense, Right?
Attaching your brand to something real, like a shirt or cap or sticker, is a big step for any business. For velospace the decision to put out merchandise was an easy one - people who love to ride bikes are proud of their passion and want to let other people know how important biking is to them. One way bikers express their pride is through clothing. See examples of velospace merch in the shop.

Deciding To Merchandise Your Brand
The decision to merchandise your brand is one to be made after figuring out how your business fits into the lives of your users / customers. Some questions that will help you determine whether merchandising is worth your time: what part of your customers’ lives does your business deal with? Does your business bring people together to share in a common passion?

If the answers to these questions suggest that your users / customers are sharing a common interest, hobby or passion, your merchandise will sell. A simple example - a tax refund preparation business that has 100 shirts printed with the business’ logo are much less likely to sell than 100 shirts printed for a business that trains show dogs. On one hand you have the emotionally vacant number-crunching tax business, and on the other hand you have emotionally invested dog fanciers who see their pets as family members. It is easy to see which business has users / customers that are proud of their association with the business.

What Kind Of Merch Should I Get?
The answers to the questions above will also help you figure out what kind of merchandise you should have made. T-shirts or polo shirts? Hoodies or caps? Bandannas or sweatpants? Stress balls or golf balls? The decision on what kind of merchandise to sell will depend on the place your business fits into the lives of your users / customers. Using the example from above - a notepad printed with a tax business logo makes sense, brightly colored caps do not. In the same way, you understand that dog sweaters printed with the logo and URL of the dog training company would fly off the shelves.

The nuts and bolts of brand design and merchandise printing, marketing, and selling are all topics beyond the scope of this short article. As always, if you have any questions or comments drop me some feedback and I will get back to you shortly.

- Greg

I got an email a while ago from Paul Thomasch, a reporter from Rueters. Paul asked if I would be interested in interviewing with him for an article he was writing about velospace and other niche social networks. I jumped on the opportunity and spoke with him on the phone for twenty or thirty minutes at lunch a week ago.

The article was published today — read up! Paul dropped a few choice quotes of mine, its great to see velospace get some more exposure.

Social networks for dogs, bikes & sneakers

Up until today velospace has only dabbled in advertising. About a year ago I ran a small direct advertising campaign and had a few ads run on the site for about six months. The ads did well, both companies are now thriving, and everyone was satisfied.

But my advertising model was cumbersome: I had to reach out to potential advertisers, negotiate the details of the ad contract, and manage the ad copy and measure the performance of the ad. This took a fair amount of time and effort.

I resisted using Google AdSense because I believed that there were not enough advertisers using the service to be interesting to velospace users. I was concerned that a lack of quality advertisers would cheapen the site. But several things have changed over the past year that helped me change my mind: 1) interest in bikes is growing, as are the number of advertisers, and 2) I can integrate the ads into velospace in a thoughtful, non obtrusive way.

As of right now ads appear in two places on the site: 1) at the bottom of content pages, before the comments, and 2) on the sidebar on bike pages. Everyone sees the ads at the bottom of the content pages. The colors and layout of the ad blend in well with the flow of the page, it is a non disruptive setup. Only visitors not logged-in to velospace see the ads on the sidebar of bike pages. This helps to keep the clutter of ads down across the site and will act as an incentive to get more visitors to sign up and log in while using velospace.

If you have any suggestions about the placement of Google ads on velospace please let me know, thanks!

- Greg

Talk is a topical open discussion thread, rotated weekly.

I’ve asked velospace users a few times for suggestions on what features they’d like to see. The most common request is for open discussion forums. There are already several excellent bike related discussion forums, including Bike Forums and MBTR.

I don’t want to have to deal with the headache of moderating an open forum. I thought up a good compromise a few months ago: a feature that would let people discuss bike related topics in a format that would be easy to moderate and simple to read.

This feature is called “talk.” Talk is a weekly open discussion thread on a particular topic. I decided to start with “What is your best bike maintenance tip?” The discussion will be open for a week, at the end of the week I will archive the comments and open up another topic for discussion.

I am hoping that over months, and years, this feature will create a stronger community amongst velospace users, as well as a repository of bike knowledge and discussions to be enjoyed by everyone.

- Greg

I use Google Analytics to track velospace metrics (visitors, page views, etcetera). Today I poked around and found an interesting report: Languages

The following is a list of the ten most common languages reported by visitors’ browsers (all time):

Language, %

1. American English, 91%
2. Japanese, 2%
3. German, 2%
4. British English, 1%
5. French, 1%
6. Polish, 1%
7. Dutch, 1%
8. Swedish, 1%
9. Italian, 1%
10. Spanish, 1%

All I have to say is hello, konnichi wa, guten tag, good day, bonjour, dzien dobry, hallo, god dag, buon giorno, hola!

- Greg

Choosing an effective slogan is difficult. Over time velospace’s slogan has changed a few times:

• dmoz entry: “a bike community/social networking site. Bikes, photos, friends - velospace caters to bicyclists from all walks of life”
• previous tag line: “an online bike community, a place for people to share bikes and photos.”
• current tag line: “velospace has one goal: to connect bike enthusiasts.”
• current meta tag description: “velospace is about bikes and the people who ride them.”

I want the velospace slogan to be 1) descriptive and 2) memorable. I think the current tag line and meta tag description achieve those goals. I’m sure the slogan will continue to evolve over the coming years, I would prefer to have a single tag line and meta tag description - consider it a work in progress!

- Greg

I heard back from Soma Fabrications yesterday. Someone there came across the velospace and Soma Fabrications post and realized that I was the person mentioned in the ad. A blog does have useful purposes it seems.

My theory of why velospace was mentioned in the ad was correct - Soma put it together quickly and didn’t want to seem like they were slamming velospace. I received a compliment on the site and that was that.

But still, no phone number. Soma Fabrications is dedicated to keeping it a secret; so be it. They have six years of business experience guiding their decision to not publish or hand out their phone number and that is fine. I am no big fish and I can’t validly criticize a company for doing something their own way. Hopefully somewhere down the road they will reconsider their position and give consumers and other interested people a chance to speak with them one on one!

- Greg

Soma Fabrications recently gave velospace a shoutout in the April issue of Road Bike Action Magazine. (hat tips to Julie for discovering the ad and to Josh for taking the photo below)

The bottom of the ad reads “Our apologies to velospace.org (>.<)"

This piqued my interest quite a bit. I spent a good hour and a half trying to track down a phone number for Soma Fabrications, to no avail. The website is completely devoid of any contact information for the company, besides for an email address. I was planning on calling and talking to the advertising person at Soma Fabrications because I wanted to see why exactly velospace got a shoutout.

I ended up sending an email to somafab@aol.com asking for the company phone number. I got back a generic response about why there is no phone number listed, but to ask any questions I have via email.

I typed up a response about why I wanted to speak with someone over the phone and that I hoped I would hear back soon. Three days later - no response from Soma Fabrications. How frustrating!

Until I have a chance to speak with someone at Soma I can only guess why they mentioned velospace in the ad. The leading theory is that the title/design of the ad grabs off some of what velospace does - photos and comments about bikes. The title of the ad is “Photospace”, the photos of bikes are not your typical product shots but rather built up bikes, and the comments next to each photo are reminiscent of the kinds of comments you’d find on velospace.

None of the photos or comments in the ad, as far as I can tell, were taken from the site. If anyone from Soma Fabrications reads this, contact me! I’d like to pick your brain about a few things and have a chat.

- Greg

A photo sharing site like velospace chews through a lot of bandwidth. A lot! Here are the past 10 months worth (rounded for readability):

Bandwidth per month, % growth over previous month

• May 2006: 20GB
• June 2006: 28 GB, 40%
• July 2006: 35 GB, 25%
• August 2006: 52 GB, 28%
• September 2006: 67 GB, 29%
• October 2006: 85 GB, 27%
• November 2006: 101 GB, 19%
• December 2006: 116 GB, 15%
• January 2007: 135 GB, 16%
• February 2007: 145 GB, 7%
• March 2007: 186 GB, 28%
• April 2007: ~200 GB, 7.5% (estimated)

The numbers are interesting. I am not sure if they tell me anything that isn’t immediately obvious. (e.g. mid-2006 was gang-busters bandwidth growth and early 2007 was softer)

The velospace marketplace is online!

A few months ago I ran a contest and asked users to answer two questions: 1. What do you use velospace for? 2. What do you wish you could do with the site that you can’t?

The responses to question 2 had a few themes: more location based features (I released the user map as a result), a central control panel (my stuff fixed this), and people wanted a place to post items for sale / trade.

I decided to wait for a while on the for sale / trade system because I wanted to make sure I thought out the details. A problem: postings going stale, solution: 2 week period for all listings. Another problem: how much control for listing format, solution: only require a description/price/photo.

I think I struck a good balance on this feature and I will be tweaking it as time goes on.

- Greg