velospace blog

velospace is a social network for bicyclists. Like all social networks, velospace depends on a mix of software to produce the product that people come back. Over the years we have tested, adopted, modified, and become fans of several different apps and services.

The following are our top 10 favorites:

1. Drupal - the foundation of velospace. Drupal is the open source content management system that velospace is built on. Drupal is the plumbing behind the content-rich side of the site. Though Drupal has its quirks, and resource hog tendencies, it is responsible for delivering tens of millions of page views to bike enthusiasts. Back in 2007 I shared some thoughts about Drupal and niche social networking sites.
2. Vanilla - the forum software. Vanilla is the open source message board system used on velospace. Vanilla is a very clean threaded discussion setup that integrates cleanly with Drupal. Vanilla and Drupal are crosslinked so users can pass seamlessly to and from each part of the site, though there are completely different code bases for each.
3. WordPress - the blog platform. WordPress is the open source system used to run the velospace blog. WordPress is amazingly adaptable blog software that has required very little in the way of maintenance over the years – besides for some drive-by hacking that plagues it.
4. Google Analytics - the web traffic monitor. Google Analytics tracks and displays an amazingly detailed picture of velospace’s web traffic. With millions of page views a month, it is vital to know where users are spending their time. Google Analytics provides the tools to discover and track what users are up to.
5. Pingdom - the external uptime monitor. Pingdom is a service that pings velospace every minute from a number of servers around the world. These pings are stored and charted, showing uptime, downtime, and response time for the site. Studying response times and tracking downtime helps us track down their causes, and gives us an opportunity to make changes to prevent them from happening in the first place.
6. Google Apps Email – the external email provider. Google Apps Email is Gmail for your own custom email address. Maintaining an email system is a pain: spam is a constant companion of any non-Google email account. Google Apps Email lets us link the velospace domain with the Gmail infrastructure – wonderful!
7. Quantcast – the public web traffic monitor. Like Google Analytics, Quantcast is a web traffic monitor for velospace. However, the results of Quantcast’s monitoring are public.
8. Jungle Disk – the backup system. Jungle Disk is a software and service backup solution that sits on the velospace server and sends backups into Amazon’s cloud storage facility. Anyone who has lost electronic data knows the importance of backups, and Jungle Disk makes things simple. velospace has some experience with data loss, making this a vital part of our operation.
9. Twitter - the communication tool. Twitter is another way for velospace to interact with users and to market its content to a wider audience. We use Twitter to advertise bikes and to market the site. Its a simple and effective way to spread word and we have built internal tools to make tweeting out featured bikes a snap.
10. Monit - the internal resources monitor. Monit keeps track of velospace server resources. The software provides statistics on CPU, RAM, database, and other services that help us figure out what is causing downtime and slowdowns. Data from Monit, paired with data from Pingdom, enables us to figure out the time frame for issues affecting the quality of service we provide. Once we have a time frame we can look at the server logs and see what the heck happened.

Each of these apps and services plays a part in delivering the bikes and other content you see on velospace. If a website is the sum of its parts, the 10 items above are at least 90% of what drives the site. Do you have a favorite app or service that you think would help velospace? Let us know!

- Greg