Floribama Riders

After ruminating on my Belly with chin down in my easy chair, thought I would give a Bodacious update on our Killer "B" weekend.  Short version, bikes, BBQ, blues, Beale, Babes, and Bama.

Long version:

I wrote some quick editorial guidelines for the site. I put them in "book page" format, rather than this blog because I see us developing these over time as a group, rather than with just one person. See the editorial guidelines.

-Ice T

Chris Haugen, my father, and I went dirt riding at the Anniston Army Depot near Talladega yesterday.  Dad looped his bike once, was closelined once, and hydrolocked his motor once.  I had a few falls and had some sprocket bolts back out.  Glad we had tools! 

Preparation for the trip to see the vaunted Valentino Rossi had begun almost a year in advance… I bought tickets via the web in November for a July race. Excited? Yes.

The best part of the trip was going to be riding with good friends via backroads out to California. 2600 miles of ever changing scenery, utilizing secondary highways as much as possible to be able to plug back in to an America that had not yet been totally homogenized into a faceless collection of Pizza Huts, Burger places, and Wal-Mart’s.

I began my prep for the journey by starting to do longer and longer trips via motorcycle to acclimate my riding to the long 600 mile days ahead. The Ducati ST2 performed admirably, after having major surgery done on her lower end (again). Columbus, Ohio…1300 mile roundtrip. TRTEAR… 900 mile weekend. Two trips to the coast, both with over 500 miles let me know that bike and rider were ready.

I have a question... is it the ride, or the destination that makes one of these weekends so special?

Here's a quickie tutorial on how to promote content to the home page. If you are in the site editors group, you have these permissions. (The Site Editors include the club officers, as well select club members with professional editorial and tech experience.)

To see a list of recent content, you can click on Content in the right nav. (Again, this link will only work if you're a site editor.) If you find a blog post that should go on the home page:

• Click on the headline for that post
• Click the edit tab and scroll to the bottom
• Expand the "publishing options" heading and check "promoted to home page." Also ensure that "published" is checked.

Once you promote a blog post to the home page, its "teaser" automatically goes to the top of the list. There are two ways to control the order of the teasers on the home page.

Even after getting a rash of crap from Ice-T about trailering instead of riding to the event, I arranged to share trailer space and fuel costs with Big Daddy and Rooster.  Of course the meet up point was in Vestavia so I still had to pack whatever I was taking onto the DR which means packing light, as I would have to ride from Montgomery.  Packing light is no problem for me because my Dad was an avid backpacker and I spent many weekends hauling whatever I needed on my back.  I was really confused when people talked about camping with tents as we had always slept in the open with maybe a space blanket lean-to if it was going to rain.

Known issues

The collage banner in the header currently gets obscured by the word Floribama. We're working on that.

The technology

"Drupal" (pronounced Droo-pul) platform. This is a free open source system that runs several major web sites and offers a lot of flexibility.

This will involve switching web hosts, but after comparing features with Community Server and DotNetNuke, I think it's best for the club.

Here's what we have accomplished thus far in Drupal.

Online registration

We can put our registration form completely online and use SSL to encrypt the data just like banks do. See http://fbr.onlineconcepts.com/user/register
(Note, you won't be able to access this page if you're already logged in.)

Paypal integration

A user can fill out a form on our site, specifying which track day options they would like. Then they click a PayPal button, and they're automatically on the PayPal site with all the right options filled in.

FBRs,

Our new web site is up and running in a development environment at http://fbr.onlineconcepts.com/.

Feel free to create your own account and test things out. (When we go live, new accounts will require approval by the treasurer or another administrator.)

Assuming everything goes well and there are no major issues, we should go live next week. For those interested in all details of how we developed the site, see this blog post. To provide feedback, you can add comments to that post, or reply to the Yahoo list for a wider audience.

http://fbr.onlineconcepts.com/blogs/admin

Quick notes:

1) We currently have an old "Moto GP or Bust" blog post as a featured item on the home page. As we add more recent content, the older posts will rotate down. A small number of FBR members will have the ability to promote content to the home page. We'll probably start with the club officers.

I'm still bushed after putting on more than 2,000 miles since Wednesday. Here we go!

Tuesday
Abandoned my original plan to leave Tuesday night, realizing, "Relax, you're on vacation."

Wednesday
Peformed maintenance on the VFR at a leisurely pace, rolled out of Atlanta around noon. Experienced that amazing feeling of departing for a long trip without any responsibilities other than to ride. Felt deja vu in Mississippi as I closed in on Tupelo and Memphis. Ah, Memphis.

Realized somewhere in Arkansas that I had not experienced a new landscape from the seat of a bike in quite a while. I had traveled recently to North Georgia, North Carolina and even northern Florida, but all those places feel kind of like my backyard. Arkansas was different. Even the cows looked different.

Stumbled into the cabin around midnight after getting lost and received a warm welcome. Yay, friendly faces!