V-Announcements: We’re Back!

We've been Buysse

I have to tell you, there is very little that gets me as aggravated as having Velominati go down. Its like having kids kicking down my sandcastle when I was a kid, watching helplessly as your labor of love collapses right before your eyes. We’ve spent the better part of the last month with the site staggering like a drunkard between being online, offline, and painfully slow. Its no way to live.

I’ve been unhappy with our host for a while, but I’ve been reluctant to move on because of the risk in changing platforms and the downtime associated with such a move. But, as my VMH cleverly pointed out on Sunday afternoon while I was tearing my hair out, I might as well take advantage of the downtime to change hosts. So we did.

After a careful evaluation, I settled on a WordPress-specific host called WP Engine. All these guys do is WordPress, and their servers are tuned specifically to the unique loads this platform imposes. They are like the Classics specialists of WordPress hosts. To my surprise, however, once I moved the site and data over to their platform even they couldn’t accomodate it without getting some of their specialists involved. I had a feeling Velominati imposed some unique demands on the platform, and it was a bit cathartic to have them express surprise over the volume of data we have. The Rules in particular has such a high volume of traffic and posts (several million hits a year and 11k posts and counting) that it simply causes things to choke. They also helped me find some optimizations in the code that helped reduce the load on the servers.

Part of the optimizations include changing how the photo upload tool works; you can still upload multiple photos into your posts, but the album tool is dead. I built that myself as a way to share photos with my family before we ever launched Velominati; it was never designed to support the kind of traffic we have here. So DM Albums is dead. Let us thank it for its service and wish it well. A-Merckx. On the plus side, you can now add captions to any photo you upload, so that’s kind of cool.

Anyway, we got it all up and running and last night I poured myself a stiff drink and flipped the switch on the domain name to point to the new boxes. Words can’t express my relief when I woke up this morning and everything was humming away nicely. We’ll give it a day or so before posting up new content just to make sure we’ve got everything squared away.

Its great to be back; let us know if you notice an improvement in site performance or anything that doesn’t seem to be working correctly. Vive la Vie Velominatus!

frank

The founder of Velominati and curator of The Rules, Frank was born in the Dutch colonies of Minnesota. His boundless physical talents are carefully canceled out by his equally boundless enthusiasm for drinking. Coffee, beer, wine, if it’s in a container, he will enjoy it, a lot of it. He currently lives in Seattle. He loves riding in the rain and scheduling visits with the Man with the Hammer just to be reminded of the privilege it is to feel completely depleted. He holds down a technology job the description of which no-one really understands and his interests outside of Cycling and drinking are Cycling and drinking. As devoted aesthete, the only thing more important to him than riding a bike well is looking good doing it. Frank is co-author along with the other Keepers of the Cog of the popular book, The Rules, The Way of the Cycling Disciple and also writes a monthly column for the magazine, Cyclist. He is also currently working on the first follow-up to The Rules, tentatively entitled The Hardmen. Email him directly at rouleur@velominati.com.

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RobSandy says:

Feb 23 2015 at 2:39 am

@markb

@ChrisO

@markb

I would gladly go back to being a mere Level 4 if it brought the Day of the Cap any closer.

Recovery is going well. If nothing else the great server outage has saved you all from regular updates.

I got out for a short ride on the weekend. Not much more than a few laps around the block to make sure I could still do it.

I’ve been doing quite a few hours on the trainer, and Zwift has been brilliant – a real sanity-saver but also very social.

Mostly 60-90 minute sessions but yesterday I did over three hours, which was 100km. Some guy in Japan did 300km in 11 hours. Tell you what, having not spent much time on trainers, I hadn’t quite appreciated how hard it is when you don’t do any freewheeling over that length of time.

I think the longest time I’ve ever endured on a trainer is 2hrs, its the tedium that gets to you. I suppose I should be doing more of it as it’s currently awkward to disappear for 1/2 day on the bike as my partner is not well and sometimes has to dash to hospital. Still on the plus side, I’m being made redundant and will have plenty of time on my hands in 3 weeks time.

Ugh. That sounds like a horrendous amount of time to sit on a turbo. Think I managed 1.5 hrs last summer training for a sportive.

I had planned plenty of turbo sessions this winter, but I joined my local cycling club instead so have been going to their track nights.

Racking up the kilometres without going more than a mile from my house! Plus it's social and I'm learning a lot about group riding.
RobSandy says:

Feb 23 2015 at 2:48 am

@tessar

@ChrisO

Yeah, Virtual Power equations fall apart when you start comparing to other people. It’s a fine method for tracking day-to-day individual progress (since all things being equal, more speed more power on a trainer) but it’s all, as they say in physics, “to a constant”.

My own power equations (what I got off of the interwebs) fall apart between me riding uphill and riding on the flat. I only use them to try and correlate my turbo trainer workouts with riding on the road. Except it doesn't seem to work. Humph.
wilburrox says:

Feb 23 2015 at 3:56 am

@Mikael Liddy

@Jay

$17,500 price tag cooled my interest somewhat…

Actually that price tag made it more interesting. Not for an actual purchase. No, no, no... that's a looney tunes price for non custom fit steel frame bike. The prospect of marketing, producing and selling all of 70 bicycles and pulling in a half million + dollars margin? And quite possibly a lot more. That's very interesting.
wilburrox says:

Feb 23 2015 at 4:08 am

@ChrisO

>>> I hadn't quite appreciated how hard it is when you don't do any freewheeling over that length of time <<<

Exactly what I noticed immediately. No freewheeling is strange. No stretching on the bike after an effort.

I've never spent time on trainer nor own one. I always chose, when weather was inclement and days were short for the two months or so here in deep south USA, to simply hit the gym and work on strength and flexibility. This year however we're working on an inaugural season for local High School Mtn Bike Club for state competition. And a local gym sponsored our team with time in their spin room. We do interval training for one hour once/week and I'm actually diggin' the experience. The heart rate monitor, for me anyways, is invaluable for getting something out of the work. I suspect power would be even better.
unversio says:

Feb 23 2015 at 6:30 am

@Jay

Where are the lugs ?? Needs lug construction.
VeloVita says:

Feb 23 2015 at 6:31 am

Thanks for all you work Frank!
tessar says:

Feb 23 2015 at 8:38 am

@RobSandy

@tessar

@ChrisO

Yeah, Virtual Power equations fall apart when you start comparing to other people. It’s a fine method for tracking day-to-day individual progress (since all things being equal, more speed more power on a trainer) but it’s all, as they say in physics, “to a constant”.

My own power equations (what I got off of the interwebs) fall apart between me riding uphill and riding on the flat. I only use them to try and correlate my turbo trainer workouts with riding on the road. Except it doesn’t seem to work. Humph.

Don't bother. Heart rate showed much more consistency to all sorts of power-estimation methods. I used Virtual Power on the turbo only to keep my indoor workouts consistent and hard.

Now that I've spent a year with a real powermeter (the ludicrously-named Power2Max) I can tell that no other device has been as instrumental in inflicting pain as this, and my race-craft and training improved significantly.

It's remarkable how much "going by feel" means you go too hard out of the gate and fade towards the end. Knocking out the same watts on the final climb as on the first gives a new definition to hard.

At the same time, it's cool to see when the science and the actual riding line up. Pulling up a file of an interval session or a race and see the exact moment you crack coincide with hitting 0 on the W'-balance chart.
tessar says:

Feb 23 2015 at 8:45 am
Frank, the new servers and the not-quite-as-new update are terrific. Two points though:
1. No point notifying us of our own reply, even if we were vain enough to quote ourselves in it.
2. In said notification mail, the link sends us to your profile. Pretty as it may be, that's probably not the address the link was supposed to direct to.
VeloSix says:

Feb 23 2015 at 1:46 pm

Glad you're back up and running, was running adrift......
VeloSix says:

Feb 23 2015 at 1:48 pm

@ChrisO

@markb

Recovery is going well.

This is good to hear!