roadskater.net

Just a quick note to say sorry RSN was down a while. I had a power supply burn out and take along his mother on the way out. Thanks to timv for assistance in the effort to deny it was really dead with various parts to test.

Thanks to tax day for making it all more pressure-packed, and to the USPS folk who were NOT THERE when I arrived with my usual at my usual 11:45 p.m. celebratory time. Sad. Bad enough to not have Krispy Kreme doughnuts and coffee. Worse still to see a lobby and parking lot full of people wondering what's up with that?

Here's a book style collection of several polls that I put together for easy flip-through voting. I hope you enjoy the polls and if you have ideas for more, please use the create/feedback form to send me your thoughts! I'm republishing this so it will show up on the main page, rather than have each poll show up. Each time I add a poll I hope to remember to let you know through this message. The newest polls are:

We roadskaters have at times had social skates at Country Park and elsewhere (NYC Central Park in Manhattan, Philly, Miami, DC). These events are great fun but it is always hard for us to find a true sweep who doesn't mind being at the back. In Manhattan, I have fond memories of a man a bit older than even myself who rode his bike quite happily at the back of several hundred skaters. He was always smiling, wearing his Aqueduct tee, with his nice easy way.

RSN2 is not for everybody, obviously, and I just wanted to mention that wherever you are in the world, if you prefer the semi-private atmosphere of an email group, you might check out my InlineNC Yahoo! group. We're up to 266 members now, and while the level of posting varies throughout the year, it's almost always about skating (events, equipment, technique, travel, training, charity, more). Members get access to the archive, which is a glorious attic of treasures from our collective past, filled with tips and tricks and tales of woe and inspiration.

I thought I was busy! I got a signup request today from someone who has an over-ten-characters-long-double-name-with-no-spaces signup name recognized on Google 91800 times (email me if you're curious). It appears the vast majority of these are forum and community site membership login names.

Roadskater.net (RSN1.net and RSN2.com) is free. You don't have to pay anything to use the site, to join, to view the articles without joining, or to be part of our inline skating, cycling and charity exercise team. You don't have to buy a jersey that says Roadskater.net or anything else.

However, often people have wanted to know how to help, so here are a few ways. All are voluntary and are totally free to you, unless you decide to make a donation....

Ha! What Fun. Silly fun, but still. I put some Verducci V-Tek Size 9 (Size 41 EU) skate boots and some off-road inline Rollerblade Coyote Size 10 (which RB call 43 EU) up for a penny each on eBay auctions. I thought they would get some attention, but wondered how much. Well looking at the Skatebay most watched skate items which are listed on the bottom of RSN2 pages (at least for now; i hope to make the display rotate "some day"), I saw both of my skate ads (with the magenta borders). That's truly some silly fun to see different things I'm doing mixed together on the web. No it's not a huge irony or coincidence but it was still a nice surprise. OK. That's all. I guess I'd better pack and get over to my parents' house to be with family and wait for turkey and hmmm...graaavy. Skateylove y'all and Happy Turkey Day. Below are links if my skates aren't showing up on the hot list any more. Blake

OK if I remember I will use this page for news about changes and experiments with the site. I've been quiet again lately because I've been putting in a lot of time in the background, updating the software for security and looking for ways to address some things I didn't like. Here are some things to try or note:

Here's the most recent list of cities that made up over 0.1% of hits over the last four months. This is incomplete and unscientific, with anomalies. Atlanta probably got a kick from my presence there often in recent weeks, and Herndon may sometimes show up when Greensboro might be the real source (Roadrunner may be a reason for this).  

Hi to all, and welcome to new members. I have been meaning to post about this issue for many weeks but have not done so.

I am looking to disable all signature files for the site and until then I will be manually deleting them. The reason for this is that unlike an email list where things vanish into the ether, this is a public website where we really don't need hundreds of copies of the same phrases, links, etc.

My photos from Tour to Tanglewood are up. See skaters from GA, NC, NJ, NY, MA, MI and TX, and the rolling north carolina hills:
http://roadskater. net/t2t2006/

The Roadskater.net team of 37 has $14,943 at this point, but our goal is $20,000. If you can us help someone with Multiple Sclerosis, please see:
http://roadskater. net/index. php?q=give- for-ms

Thank you!

Here's my report from the 2005 Tour to Tanglewood Awards Ceremony, which I hope will inspire us, now that the skating and cycling for 2006's Tour is done, to look at what we can do from now until our donations are due.

Please give to the people who help the people with Multiple Sclerosis. If not here, somewhere. To give to the 2006 Tour to Tanglewood Roadskater.net Team, please visit the pages below and pick someone, especially someone with under $200 in donations, but anyone on the team.

I gave the first hints of the secret color in..."Sunlight on Leaves to Go with Late Day Sky Through Thin Cloud"

http://roadskater.net/index.php?q=get-your-roadskater-net-2006-jersey#comment-355

Sometimes when writing in another program, or as I often do, writing in the Yahoo Mail Beta interface, then pasting over to RSN2.com, I will click Submit and look at the article and find the paragraphs have not come out properly. For those who have edit rights on their own articles, you can use a "Paste Special Unformatted" trick in Windows at least to get the formatting back. Internet Explorer doesn't let me do Paste Special Unformatted, so I use WordPad to strip the text:

I finally got a break to try to catch up on reading all the great stuff you writers have been posting and remembered a useful menu item:

View / Recent Posts

I want to improve this in a couple of ways, but for now it has new posts (ones you have not clicked) with a red "new" and new replies with "new." I plan to increase the number listed per page and perhaps to turn blue new to red new. I also would like to create a View / Unread Posts if I find the time.

For those interested in the geographic distribution of visitors to roadskater.net, here is some recent data, which is not complete, probably not entirely accurate as to visitor location in every case, and definitely does not typically include Midnight to 6 a.m. Eastern Time, thus under-reporting Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania, perhaps. Nevertheless, it may be interesting and inspiring to potential writers who know something about these areas, or for other reasons. In any case, I thought I'd share where just over 50% of the hits have come during two time periods.

none of these

rs-n.com

rsk1.com

rska.net

rskr.net

rsn0.com

rsn1.net

The right sidebar now includes 50 recent visitors' locations once again. This feature was broken (or rather, the service it was using was broken), and this was causing a long delay in RSN content. Thanks to Mark, Tim, Craig and Elizabeth for input on this issue.

I've added Current Air Quality to the left sidebar of Roadskater.net as a test of usefulness. There are two graphics, which represent the current Ozone and Particulate Matter 2.5 readings for the USA.

I've added some links in the links area beneath full page postings so that users of certain tag sharing and other sites can quickly recommend our content or bookmark it. I'd like your help evaluating which of these you think are worth keeping and which you think I might just want not to display. Also if you know more social tagging sites you'd recommend, please feel free to use the create/site feedback form to let me know, or comment on this article. The links I am including at the start are for: del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, ma.gnolia.com, Newsvine, Furl, Google, Yahoo, Technorati, IceRocket, and PubSub.

Also, this is pretty neat: http://digg.com/spy

Hi to everyone, especially all of you who are contributing writers, with thanks a ton for what you do.

I've been temporarily out of the posting loop as i worked on tags, terms and a few new features that will hopefully help us reach out and be reached. I look forward to catching up on reading!

Here's a place for me to say what's up with the new roadskater.net in beta at rsn2.com. Please reply via create/site feedback:

20060714 I've added the following cities based on being top hitters over the past few weeks...

The tag clouds are working properly (no duplicates!) and floating above us as we move through the site. I'm testing this setup and will be changing the look of some things as well over the next couple of days. Please feel free to send feedback via CREATE/SITE FEEDBACK.

You may notice on the sidebars there are some topics whose text size has grown quite a bit. These are in the "tags in..." sections, called "tag clouds."

[Update July 9, 2006: If you've clicked these tag links before, please try them again. I have finally found the errant code that was conflicting with tag clouds working as they should. You should now see only one copy of each article tagged with that tag, instead of multiples. I recjoice at this repair, even though there is still work to do to track and repair the problem with a long term happy solution. Remember also the difference between clicking tags and searching. Both are great ways of finding information, but they produce different results.]

This is a brief guide to using roadskater.net. We'll all add pages as we see what we need. Thanks for being here, and we hope you have tons of fun. JOIN! VOTE! WRITE! CREATE! MAP YOURSELF! MEET! ASK! DISCUSS! SHARE! Let's not forget that others helped us find our love of wheels and we should take the time to pass it along.

Welcome to Roadskater.net, "the skating, cycling and charity magazine you can create!" Please click stuff! See what happens! Check out http://roadskater.net/index.php?q=start-here-how-to-use-roadskater-net. Read all you like, but to contribute, we ask you to join first to help foil junkbots. And don't worry, the 15,000+ photos and movies from http://roadskater.net/index.htm are still there waiting. Skateylove Yes! Blake