Poppin' Fresh

See the red & white buttons over the dancing cats? Click on those and you'll find exactly what you're looking for.

It’s been a little over a year since I took over BIKEMAG.com, yet this is the first time I’ve written something about the mechanics of this website. There’s a good reason for that—most people don’t give a damn about how a site works or who mans it: they just want to read and see something entertaining.

To that end, I’ve spent the last year posting a respectable load of new, gear reviews, columns, features, news reports, interviews, photo galleries, video clips and whatever random nonsense pops into my head. In fact, I published over 245 such items over the course of this past year—and when you subtract all the weekends from the calendar year (I don’t post on weekends, dammit!), that amounts to new content just about every damn day. Poppin’ fresh.

But I’m writing less to pimp the past than to showcase the present. You may have noticed that this website looks different today. While it’s not a radical Madonna-style “look at me, now I talk like the Queen of England!” kind of personality change, we’ve greatly streamlined the homepage the site.

LESS CLICKS, MORE BIKE PORN See the screen shot of bikemag.com (it's above this paragraph, and to the right). Okay, now see those red and white buttons above the picture of the dancing cats? Good, now when you've finished this article and you're back on the homepage, run your cursor over those red and white buttons and menus will drop down. These new drop-down menus will take you exactly where you want to go. In short, much less time spent clicking, much more time spent actively shirking your duties at work. Yay!

If you didn’t notice these changes, I’m going to suggest you drive home and tell your wife/significant other/dog that their hair looks great, because if you’re that unobservant you’ve probably also missed the past seven years of their hairstyling efforts. You inconsiderate bastard.

Whate else is new? Well, I’ve gone and created a new gear archive. It’s now much easier and more intuitive to search for that review of the mint-scented chamois cream, spoke tensionometer or Santa Cruz Nomad.

Oh, there are a few other tweaks here and there, but I’m going to suggest that you give the site a whirl and check it out for yourself.

WHO THE HELL AM I? Well, I’m a Taurus—my earth-healer psychiatrist tells me this is why I throw beer bottles at people I don’t like. Who knows? I’m also one of a handful of thirty-something year olds who have wasted their youth in the bike industry. Accordingly, I am bald, occasionally goateed, and I favor short, black cycling socks (which make me the laughing stock of every truck stop I walk into). I’ve been doing this editor-thing for about a decade now. Before that, I worked in a suit in various big and mighty places of power. Protestors occasionally threw cat poo on me. I was a whiz at making Excel-based pie charts and Power Point presentations. All things considered, I’ll take the jokes about my little black socks any day of the week.

I'm like Julia, but I ride a bike and I'm hairier and I'm not dead yet.

I live in Humboldt County, California and, yes (sigh), people smoke a lot of pot up here. But there’s more to this place than survivalists and hippies and assorted folks who live up here in the redwoods because they don’t play well with others. There’s good riding, excellent fishing and if you like to uh…let’s see….well, if you like to ride and fish, you’re stoked.

I don’t have an editor, my laptop’s spell check utility is as lazy as I am and I unconsciously use a fair bit of vulgarities in my writing. This may or may not offend you. My hygiene, however, is impeccable and I like to think this counts for a lot.

I have two dogs that are uglier than I am and a very loving wife who can see past my occasional psoriasis outbreaks. I’m a lucky man.

I hope you enjoy the revamped site. I’m working feverishly on it.