Pedal Room Blog

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!

You know that feeling of riding your favorite bike? It's just a joy, and it makes you ride more and more. Sure, you can ride an old bike that doesn't quite fit right and get from point A to B, but it's not going to be as fun, and you won't ride as often.

The latter is how we've felt building Pedal Room lately. Right now, it's built in a programming language that's old and works fine, but isn't much fun to develop in. But recently, we've decided to rewrite the site in a newer, much-more-fun language that I've been using for years at my day job - Ruby on Rails. The rewriting process allows us to clean up code and build a more reliable version of the site, and the new language will make it easier and more fun to build more features for the site!

It's going to be awesome, and we can't wait to finish the rewrite and build out more features and improvements for the site. Stay tuned!

Happy holidays from the Pedal Room team!

We tried our hardest to crank out our big feature we've been working on, but couldn't quite get it polished up enough to release it. Very soon though!

Ride safe and enjoy the holidays!

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!

Sorry to keep with the not-so-visible improvements, but today was more bug fixes.

A couple items fixed today include a couple tiny layout fixes, a fix to further optimize external images, and added logging to keep track of more feature use throughout Pedal Room.

More exciting updates will be coming tomorrow! We promise!

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!

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!

...was unfortunately missing a small improvement. We were pretty slammed with other Pedal Room work, a bike ride, and an awesome rock show, and couldn't find time to build anything out for the site. We're sorry!

But we'll make up for it today with more improvements to the site! Check back later today!

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!

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!