Posts tagged pedalroom

Search Improvements - Part One

June 24, 2010 07:48 PM

Today we released a new option that helps immensely in finding the right bikes on Pedal Room - The ability to match all keywords when searching.

This means if you search for "cannondale track" and choose the match all keywords option, only bikes which have both "cannondale" and "track" will be found. Very useful for searching for specific bikes! Stay tuned - more search improvements are coming soon!

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New Pedal Room Stickers!

June 22, 2010 12:07 AM

Our new Pedal Room stickers are in! Let us know if you want some and we'll send some your way!

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Better Photo UI!

June 21, 2010 06:39 PM

We finally finished up our new photo UI and released it a few minutes ago. Gone are the photo comments* and now the photos are loaded inline in the same page, which is faster and allows you to see the bike's details, comments, other photos, and of course, the current photo all in the same page! Let us know what you think!

* Photo comments aren't actually removed. They have been moved to the bike details page. Feel free to go through your bikes and remove any comments that don't make any sense in the context of the bike details page (which shouldn't be too many.)

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Upcoming Enhancements

May 26, 2010 04:53 AM

We're currently working on some small changes that will help Pedal Room show up in search engines better, which will in turn help the site grow faster.

One of these changes is getting photos to show up more prominently in image searches, so we're redesigning the way images on Pedal Room work from the ground up. We're considering removing image comments to make things more simple and faster. What do you guys and gals think of that? We'd love to hear any feedback, so just let us know what you think!

Other changes coming soon include improved searching and bike browsing, both of which will be coming very soon!

P.S. Don't miss today's interview with Kyle about his custom pursuit track bike!

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Featured Bike Interviews!

April 14, 2010 08:38 AM

We've started interviewing some of our featured bike owners! We hope that you guys enjoy these interviews as much as we've enjoyed talking with cyclists!

Currently, we've got an interview with Fabian about his gorgeous Colnago Pista, and a couple days ago we interviewed Matthew Divita from iMiNUSD about his Green Cannondale Track.

We're always looking out for nice bikes and interesting content, so stay tuned for more and enjoy!

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Last Week at Pedal Room...

March 28, 2010 08:54 AM

Last week was a busy week, with a lot of new work going into Pedal Room.

We started the process of redesigning our forms to be more accommodating. See below.

You've probably noticed this already - we redesigned our home page! It now includes featured bikes, which we'll be updating regularly, and a new layout. Oh yeah, the login box for visitors who aren't logged in yet moved to the top right of each page.

On the backend side of things, we've been fixing a few errors and bugs that have popped up as a result of our new site framework. We've also upgraded our logging and error delivery systems, so that our team gets notified more quickly when problems occur. Also, we improved some of our caching mechanisms, which should speed up the site a bit more.

Coming This Week

This week will be good. We have some sweet new bikes to feature, and we're starting work on our big new feature. We're incredibly excited about what's coming very soon (like within the next month) for Pedal Room, and we really hope you guys like it too. Also this week, we plan to roll out more form and general design upgrades. Stay tuned and ride safe!

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Making Pedal Room Faster - Part One

March 21, 2010 10:00 PM

We just released some new code that greatly speeds up the site! It's only on the home page right now, but we plan on implementing it on more pages very shortly. Let us know what you think of the home page speed, and if you find any problems!

Btw, we're also working on several other speed improvements, hence the "part one" in the title. Stay tuned for part two, coming later this week!

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New Site Framework!

March 17, 2010 04:50 AM

We just launched the rewrite of Pedal Room! Several bugs were fixed in the rewrite and the site should be running better, but the best part is that with this rewrite done, we'll be able to focus on building out new features and making the site better all around!

There might be a few bugs here and there, so please let us know if you see anything that seems off. Enjoy!

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Getting Close!

March 05, 2010 09:03 AM

As some of you may know, we're currently in the process of rewriting Pedal Room in a much nicer framework/programming language. Just to give you guys an update, we estimate that we're about 70% done, and hope to release the new code within a couple weeks. Everything will look similar, but should be faster and have improvements here and there.

One thing that we're extremely excited about is our automated tests of the site. We've written almost as much automated testing code as we have application code. This means that every time we work on something new, we run our test suite. If we broke something, the test suite lets us know. This will prevent numerous bugs from slipping out to the site. Here's a breakdown of code that's been written so far: (warning - it's nerdy)

Stay tuned for updates and the new site infrastructure coming soon!

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Maps on Member Profiles

December 24, 2009 06:53 AM

We didn't get a chance to post until right now, but yesterday's improvement is hopefully helpful. We added maps to member profiles so that you can easily determine where someone is located at-a-glance. We'll let the screenshot do the talking.

If you guys really like this, we will make the maps better in the future. We could add nearby members to the map, make it interactive, etc. So let us know what you think!

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Infrastructure Improvements

December 21, 2009 11:33 PM

Tonight's small improvement is not really small, but also not really visible.

We've been slaving away working on some infrastructure improvements, including modifying the database and working on a new backend to handle some upcoming features, like a marketplace! We've also added more logging so we can better respond to problems with the site, and found a few bugs that we'll be fixing in the coming days. Expect some cool new stuff soon!

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Photo Sharing Options

December 20, 2009 11:32 PM

Today we added some new photo sharing options. We'll let the screenshot below do the talking. Enjoy, and let us know what you think!

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Bug Fixes

December 18, 2009 11:24 PM

Today we were going to finish up image enhancements, but ran into some technical difficulties that need to be attended to and will take longer than planned. So instead we fixed several backend bugs.

These bugs all affect core components of the code (and one improves login/authentication security). Tomorrow the image sharing stuff will be online!

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Image Sharing Enhancements Part 1

December 17, 2009 11:54 PM

Today we laid the groundwork for enhanced image sharing. Our server can now dynamically create optimized photos for other sites to display. Here's a little example:

I have a bike, such as my Cannondale Track, on Pedal Room. I want to show off a photo of the bike somewhere - maybe a forum or a blog.

Starting tomorrow, you'll be able to find a photo on Pedal Room and get sharing options, including the raw photo URL, HTML, and BB code. The optimized image can then be displayed elsewhere, and it will indicate that it came from Pedal Room. Then others not only save time by loading an optimized image, but they can also can find their way to Pedal Room to find more bike photos and details.

It should be pretty cool, and we've done all the hard infrastructure work to support this already. Tomorrow we'll have the finished work done and on the site!

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More Speed Improvements!

December 16, 2009 11:16 PM

Today we made Pedal Room even faster!

Recently, we realized that some of our small thumbnail images are way bigger in file size than they should be. We were seeing 48x48 pixel images that should be around 2 kilobytes actually being as big as 67 kilobytes.

We figured out the problem almost instantly - we'd forgotten to strip color profiles and comments out of images as we sized them down to create thumbnail images.

So today we fixed the code to strip the extra data out of images when we resize them. From now on, all photos added to Pedal Room will be missing this extra data. This is good - the photos will load faster and will look the same as before. That solved part of the problem. However, this was only part of the problem - the existing images on the server still needed to be optimized.

So we wrote some scripts that run on the server and optimize existing images. Basically, the script converts all images, one-by-one. For each image, if the converted image has a 5% or greater reduction in filesize, we throw out the original and replace it with the optimized version.

For every one of the thousands of thumbnail images we optimized, we reduced file size by an average of 62.7%. For the tiny 48x48 pixel images on the site (the ones you see on the home page in the random photos area for example), we saved 28.7 megabytes. Massive savings were also made elsewhere, including in the regular thumbnails.

This translates into faster load times, and reduced server load and hosting costs. Win win!

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Making Pedal Room Faster

December 15, 2009 07:39 PM

Today's small improvement was making Pedal Room a bit faster.

First and foremost, we now load random photos on the home page (and browse bikes page) after the rest of the page has finished loading. This makes the rest of the page load faster than normal, while images take about as long as before to load.

We also spent a good amount of time tweaking the server, and added far-future cache-expire headers to static images, CSS, and JavaScript. We also added ETags that work properly. In English, this means that your browser should keep a local copy of static images and files so that it doesn't have to load as much on every page.

We still have a lot we can and will do to make Pedal Room faster! Tomorrow we may do more speed improvements, or maybe something different. Stay tuned!

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Slightly Improved Navigation + Some Thoughts

December 13, 2009 11:52 PM

Today was a pretty simple update. We simply added a link on the "BIKES" menu at the top of the page to add a bike to Pedal Room. This makes it easier for new visitors to figure out how to add their bike, and allows logged in members to easily add additional bikes.

We've been tweaking navigation here and there because small changes to navigation can have big affects.

We've also been analyzing our stats on the site, and we've found some interesting patterns.

Member Browsing/Searching is not used very much. Member browsing and searching accounts for less than one percent (0.7% to be exact). Because of this, we're considering removing the "MEMBERS" bar from the top navigation to clean things up a bit and make one thing clear - Pedal Room is all about bikes. We would of course have member profiles and a member map, but that stuff would be a bit harder to get to. What do you guys think about this?

The Member Map is also not used much at all. Last month, map-related page views accounted for 0.18% of site traffic. Is this something you guys would like to see improved? Maybe it would be better if we showed primarily bikes instead of members on the map? Let us know what you want to see on the map.

Bike Search is used frequently. This is good to see. Because it's used frequently, we plan on improving it in the near future.

Thoughts? Let us hear them!

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New About Page!

December 12, 2009 11:57 PM

Today's improvement is pretty small. We simply updated the About page on the site. It used to be unfinished - now there's at least a little bit of content there.

Wanna be part of the Pedal Room team? Let's talk!

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Fourteen Days 'til Christmas!

December 11, 2009 09:27 PM

With fourteen days left until Christmas, we've managed to release a small improvement every day for the past few days.

Today will be no different, though our improvement today is quite small. We simply added links from our browse bikes and browse members pages to each page's respective advanced search form. This way it'll be a bit easier to navigate and find members or bikes.

Stay tuned! We're not sure what we're releasing tomorrow but we'll think of something fun!

P.S. Don't miss hyakumangoku's sweet Anchor track bike. Friggin' awesome bike!

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Simpler Registration!

December 10, 2009 11:48 PM

Starting today, it's going to be a lot easier for new members to add their bikes to Pedal Room.

Instead of going through the full registration form, they can now skip directly to the add a bike form. If they're not logged in, they simply provide a username and email when they're adding their bike and we'll create an account for them.

Hopefully this will encourage more people to join and add their bikes since it's a lot less work to create an account and add a bike now. Pedal Room should then grow faster! Everybody wins!

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