The Chainlink

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Bike Geeks

Cyclist I.T. Nerds.  Group to support Julie with TheChainLink.org technical consulting and maintenance, and to develop a pool of programmers and web developers for local cycling projects.

Inspired by the extraordinarily high ratio of I.T. Professionals I've met on rides, the ongoing discussion about TCL and Ning, and the urgent need for help with BikeGeeks.org projects.

If you are a cyclist, and have I.T. skills, please join this group to begin what could become some productive networking.

Website: http://bikegeeks.org
Location: chicago
Members: 31
Latest Activity: Oct 20, 2016

Discussion Forum

Calling all web developers! Bike commuting experience a plus!

Hello Bike Geeks, hope you are doing well! We’re continuing to move forward on so many exciting projects and we’d greatly appreciate your help fielding this RFP out for Bike Commuter Challenge 2014…Continue

Started by Active Transportation Alliance Dec 13, 2013.

Looking for a Web developer hosting service

I am a member of a committee with an Evanston based church which is redeveloping our web site and interested in supporting fellow cyclists.  We are in the process of searching for a…Continue

Started by SkokieSurly Apr 26, 2013.

Hosting Recommendations

Like this isn't a topic done a bazillion times on the web, but hey, local personal experience matters.POST YOUR WEB HOSTING EXPERIENCES and RECOMMENDATIONS HERE PLEASE!I'm constantly looking for…Continue

Started by Andrew Bedno Dec 18, 2012.

Comment Wall

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Comment by Andrew Bedno on August 15, 2014 at 1:30am

Favorites question answered elsewhere.
I've worked with several of the APIs.  There's only a few.  Google/Bing/MapQuest of course do anything including directions but charge in some cases.  OpenStreets is an increasingly popular choice but mainly just for for map rendering.
The few most well developed apps have APIs including Strava and MapMyRide and Garmin and Nike, but mainly for export.
Divvy does, for oneself.  Socrata does, for city data.
And technically all of the social systems have geo info in API's, such as check-ins on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, but that's probably drifted outside the question.

Comment by Julie Aberman (Hochstadter) on August 13, 2014 at 4:53pm

And an update on hosting - we are going with WPEngine.   Thanks for your suggestions there as well.

Comment by Julie Aberman (Hochstadter) on August 13, 2014 at 4:52pm

Hey guys, 

Looking for your favorite map and route sites and tools you currently use.   

Since you guys would know if it has an API, include if it does as well

This is research for the new website.

Thanks! 

Comment by Steven Lane on March 4, 2014 at 11:57am

West Town Bikes needs a new website, so I'm hosting a weekend web jam at my place, THIS WEEKEND!!!

It's a Drupal site, so we need programmers, designers, and content developers. No money, but lots of snacks and libations. If you can party and work, you can join us, otherwise do not waste our precious time. Ninjas only, we ain't fucking around!

West Town Bikes Weekend Web Jam
Castle Bikenstein, 1549 W. Chicago Ave
Sat & Sun, 11am - 11pm
No buzzer, call Steven Lane 312-504-7108

Comment by Andrew Bedno on February 11, 2014 at 12:26pm

http://www.thechainlink.org/forum/topics/divvy-data-challenge

Divvy visualization competition.  Offers huge anonymized trip dataset.

I wish I could field an entry, but my plate's much too full to undertake a big challenging freebie.

Comment by Andrew Bedno on February 6, 2014 at 7:20pm

I always said Ning is a pretty great PaaS value.  WPEngine has a slick site and a trial offer (but a beta up there under some other name and see how it performs under some load).  HostGator's site is almost kitsch "We eat up the competition!" - so there's that.

Comment by Justin B Newman on February 6, 2014 at 6:45pm

In my opinion, if TCL is going to operate in absence of a permanently-retained consultant, or an active team of senior administrators, a "Platform as a Service" such as WPEngine Pro is the only real option.

For any other option, who is managing, say, the firewall? Who's dealing with redundancy, and backups? Amazon, etc. are cheap until you consider that you have to do all the labor. DDOS Mitigation? Application firewalls? (Cloudflare + mod_security are great. mod_security needs care and feeding, though). A platform as a service firm should take care of all these things. 

Comment by Andrew Bedno on February 6, 2014 at 5:13pm

Nice work Tom.  This is not a let's simply choose one challenge.
I'd further say you should oblige the developer to be involved in the choice, and share responsibility for it fully operating as planned on the eventual host, or it'll be a convenient out (oh, that's a hosting problem).

Personally, number one problem I always hit is email capacity.  TCL probably generates tens of thousands of messages a day.  No ordinary host will allow that, and you must confirm in advance in writing.

In all cases you're going to need ongoing expertise to take care of what Ning did for you (option 1 below), which is NOT a small job.  Sorry, but you should budget possibly a few hundred $ a month, at least for the first year or so.

I have some huge and high traffic sites happily hosted on GoDaddy.  Amazingly, they offer unlimited space and bandwidth cheap (option 2 below).  But charge extra for bulk email.

Professionally, I may no longer recommend anything other than Amazon cloud (option 3 below).  But again with the email, large outgoing volume requires using their messaging and queuing services, which may not be supported by stock content management systems out of the box.

Bottom line, find someone's who's done exactly the same kind of migration before and ask them.

Ka'Plach!

Comment by Alex on February 6, 2014 at 1:30pm
Hey Bike Geeks on The Chainlink,
It's Alex, The Chainlink intern tasked with helping on the build out of the new site.  
The developer is done with the research, development and specking stage and has just started "prototype and design" stage (he ended up doing some wireframing earlier and started buildout as we gave him the features we wanted included).  
They say the launch will happen quite soon, around springtime.  
It's time to make a decision about hosting.
Our developer suggested these two as viable options:
However, we are also wondering if it'd be worth using Amazon, which is cheaper, but requires us to set it up and maintain it ourselves. 
Comment by Andrew Bedno on February 3, 2014 at 3:15pm

Cross posting from the BikeGeeks.org mailing list:

Hey Folks ->

As you know, we have begun work on a new website for BTG's old member organization -- West Town Bikes.  

After a strong start, the project has foundered.  And that's where you come in.

We're looking for someone to come in and provide the leadership necessary to get this job complete. 

You need to be a fairly strong Drupaler -- the folks who are already involved will continue to stay involved, but we need someone who can do it all (for the most part).

The work involves setting up the site in the context of a nifty, but complex purchased theme.  Additionally, there is coordination work with a company hired to complete the CiviCRM setup.
WTB won't be able to pay you what you're worth in today's market, but can give you some neato thankyous.  Sweet bike?  Free classes?  You name it and it could likely be yours.
 
Give me a call to discuss -- 773-220-4134.
 
thanks,
tod
 

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