Posts tagged newfeatures

You're looking at the updated Pedal Room, at least on this page. Bit by bit I'll be working on the site and improving things, starting with the home page. The home page is now mobile-friendly, and does a better job at showing off bikes.

The general discussion forum is temporarily removed, as it was just a cesspool of scumbag spammers and bots. There's new filters to try to better weed out the bots and spammers in other areas too, and as I improve the tech I'll be able to hopefully get things like notifications working again.

Other pages like bike browsing pages and profiles are also updated to use the new mobile-friendly layout.

I wanted to have the whole site switched over, but figured I'd start small and get something out, and continue to iterate. It's been too long since I've spent time updating and caring for the site, and my goal is to change that and improve things.

What I really want for Pedal Room is for it to be a great space for bikes, with more searching and browsing options, a better marketplace, and less lowlife spammers.

Thank you to everyone who's here reading this, and stay tuned for more work on the site coming very soon. Cheers!

-Coomer

So yesterday I promised a post about what's coming in the near future, and while I'm still not 100% sure on what exactly is coming and when, here's some of what I've got planned.

Something I'm really excited about is a rating system for bikes that will personalize your bike browsing experience. For example, if you rate a bunch of  classic Italian steel bikes highly, you'll see personalized suggestions for more Italian steel and similar bikes we think you might enjoy based on what users similar to you like. I think this will really be great, and I'm super excited to build it out.

For bikes with bike history, I'm working on better management manage stages and photo. For example, dragging and dropping photos to stages, which is buggy, will be fixed soon.

Another thing in the works is better moderation and management of content, including community flagging and a small moderator team to help keep things in check.

Finally, I've got some improvements to the marketplace, including a feedback system and search, that will be launching soon.

I've also toyed with the idea of building a feature/mobile app to find others to ride with as well as provide a calendar of planned rides/events, but I'm not quite sure on that yet. I'm curious to hear what everyone thinks of this.

That's some of what I've got planned, but that's definitely not it, and I'll be working hard to improve the site a lot in the coming weeks. Let me know what you think, and what you'd like to see on the site. Cheers!

 

Today I'm happy to announce the launch of our new Marketplace! It's been a long time coming, but it's finally done, so be sure to check it out here, and let us know what you think!

By the way, there are several improvements planned for the marketplace in the near future, such as a buyer/seller feedback system, improved photos, and search features. Stay tuned!

Today I'm happy to announce the launch of two big new features on Pedal Room - Bike History and Forums!

Bike History
Bike history allows you to track progress as your bike evolves over time. Every bike can have unlimited stages of history, each containing specs, info, and photos.

More info / FAQ on Bike history | See an Example Bike with History

Forums
As Pedal Room has grown, so too has the need for the site to become more social and powerful. We hope that the forums become a thriving community for all things bikes.

Visit the Forums

I hope you all enjoy the new features! I'll be working hard over the coming weeks to continually improve everything on the site as well as launch a couple new cool things. Stay tuned, and let me know what you think!

Just a heads up that you can now navigate through a bike's photos using the left and right arrow keys (once a large photo is open). Thanks to chewypurple for the idea!

Now on FourteenTeeth you can view local blogs for select areas! More locations and blogs are coming very soon, but we wanted to get the concept out there with a few local blogs and get some feedback.

So let us know what you think!

How it Works:

We guess your location based on your IP address (most websites do this, it's nothing to be worried about). We then find the closest supported city (or country) and request blogs based there. You can also change your location to view local blogs for any area! We optimized everything to make the experience as fast as possible.

Coming Soon:

Many more locations and blogs! We need suggestions! We also hope to break down some of the countries, like Australia, into regions. But most of all we just need more coverage in terms of locations and blogs. So send suggestions our way!

We've also got a few bugs to fix and some things to improve. The maps, for example, don't always look the best. We might go to a region-based approach, or allow blog ordering/filtering. Let us know how we can make FourteenTeeth better!

We just brought photo comments back! Now you can comment on specific photos as well as bikes themselves!

Thanks everyone for the feedback! It's much appreciated, as we're continually trying to make Pedal Room better!

PS, my next project is the FourteenTeeth local blogs stuff, which is coming along well. Stay tuned!

We've been thinking about photos a fair amount lately, and today we made it possible to link directly to an open photo on a bike details page. Simply click the "direct link" on any photo to get a URL that will link to that photo.

We're also thinking about bringing back photo comments, maybe like so:

What do you guys and gals think about photo comments? Are they a worthwhile thing to have? Should we bring them back? Or are bike comments alone good enough? Let us know - we want to make your Pedal Room experience as good as possible!

By the way, if you're wondering what ridiculously nice bike is pictured, it's gospastic's Ritte Bosberg.

You can now choose the "Photogrid" option when viewing search results to view them in a grid of photos - a nice mode for browsing bikes. We still have a few tweaks to make, but let us know what you think so far and what we can do better!

Today we upgraded our photo uploader. You can now select multiple photos, as well as cancel uploads in progress (if you accidentally chose the wrong file for example). This is a prerequisite to a cool new feature that's coming soon. Check back soon!

A couple days ago, someone suggested that we have a slideshow option for viewing bikes. It sounded like a good idea, so I threw this together. Now you can view search results in slideshow format.

Let us know what you guys think and if there's anything we can do to make the site better! We're always looking for ways to improve!

Everyone should really store their bikes' serial numbers somewhere. This little bit of data can be invaluable if a bike is stolen, and we want to make it easier for everyone to keep track of it.

So now you can add your bike's serial number (or other identifying markings) on that bike's edit bike page. We'll store it for you, and only you will have access to it if you ever need it.

You can now order bikes by page views, popularity (though I admit our algorithm needs a bit more tweaking), and most-favorited! More bike browsing and searching improvements coming tomorrow!

We just released code that allows bike searches to be ordered. This should make finding/browsing bikes a bit easier! Anything else you guys would like to see to improve the site? Let us know!

We just made a few nice little tweaks to Pedal Room. Just a few of many we plan to make in the next few weeks.

We added a quick bike search form on various pages to make searching for bikes easier. Pretty soon we'll have a nice quick bike search on every page. Oh yeah, we also fixed some bugs around search.

We also made comment author photos clickable, and added links to members' other bikes for members with multiple bikes.

We just released some updates to improve photo uploads! Now, once you choose a photo, it starts uploading immediately, showing a progress bar as it uploads.

This not only helps figure out how long it'll take for the upload to finish, but we also re-configured the server so that photo uploads don't slow down the server. We hope you guys enjoy it.

And we combined the add photos page and manage photos page into one, so managing all aspects of your photos is even easier!

P.S. We also fixed several bugs with various parts of the site. And we're working to allow for even higher-resolution photos to be saved and viewable by all.

Today we released our second round of search improvements. Now, when you do a bike search, we not only search the bike title, specs, and description, but we also search any tags associated with that bike. This should mean that you get more accurate search results.

We also added search boxes (and sometimes clickable search suggestions too - hooray!) to search results pages, so you can easily perform another quick search. We're thinking about expanding search options near the search box on search results pages, but we weren't sure. We'd love to hear what you guys and gals think and what you'd like to see!

Hope everyone has a good weekend! Ride safe!

Today we released a new option that helps immensely in finding the right bikes on Pedal Room - The ability to match all keywords when searching.

This means if you search for "cannondale track" and choose the match all keywords option, only bikes which have both "cannondale" and "track" will be found. Very useful for searching for specific bikes! Stay tuned - more search improvements are coming soon!

We finally finished up our new photo UI and released it a few minutes ago. Gone are the photo comments* and now the photos are loaded inline in the same page, which is faster and allows you to see the bike's details, comments, other photos, and of course, the current photo all in the same page! Let us know what you think!

* Photo comments aren't actually removed. They have been moved to the bike details page. Feel free to go through your bikes and remove any comments that don't make any sense in the context of the bike details page (which shouldn't be too many.)

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!