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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View Comments

DCR says:

Feb 24 2015 at 6:42 am

Thanks for the hard work Frank. As always this site is just another gear in the cassette that fuels the passion of cycling.
VeloSix says:

Feb 24 2015 at 12:33 pm

@Nate

Thanks be to Merckx for all your hard work, frank.

I would have reduced the servers to rubble with a chain whip, pedal wrench and headset press had I been in your position.

Yes, Thanks for your work @Frank. I'm glad things are back
RobSandy says:

Feb 25 2015 at 1:30 pm

@tessar

@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.

I keep stumbling upon heart rate. It's not something I've had any intention of using, but I can see how it would have a use, especially as I'm planning to get in to doing time trials (riding my first 10 mile mid-March). Science is the difference between feeling and knowing, and HR seems a pretty scientific method of gauging one's suffering. Plus, I'm not going to fork out for a power metre any time soon.
Jay says:

Feb 25 2015 at 7:13 pm

@unversio

I do agree that lugged steel is more elegant, and provides stronger joints. However, TIG welded joints can look nice and do the job. My own preference is that TIG welds are used on titanium tubes and steel tubes should be joined with lugs,
tessar says:

Feb 26 2015 at 7:51 am

@RobSandy

I keep stumbling upon heart rate. It’s not something I’ve had any intention of using, but I can see how it would have a use, especially as I’m planning to get in to doing time trials (riding my first 10 mile mid-March). Science is the difference between feeling and knowing, and HR seems a pretty scientific method of gauging one’s suffering. Plus, I’m not going to fork out for a power metre any time soon.

HR requires a little more thinking on the end-user's part, but it can be a very effective tool especially for time-trialling. Before I got my power metre, I got HR-based pacing down to a science. I could target a 40k TT and know, to within 2bpm, whether this was a reasonable effort or if I'd blow.

Basically, find out what your threshold is (loosely correlated to the average HR over an hour maximal effort), find your maximum and rest heart rates, and through some math-ing and testing you can figure out what %age of your threshold HR works for what length of time. The only catch is that even with a thorough warmup, HR has a delayed reaction so don't overshoot the start.

Pacing using a power metre is essentially the same, except one measures the effort itself (power) and the other the body's reaction (HR) - who behave linearly one in relation to the other, except that relationship changes depending on fatigue and environmental factors.
Chris says:

Feb 26 2015 at 3:28 pm

OiÂ @frank! WTF is going on with the Official Rapha Team Sky Blue (TM) all over the place? Is that now the official colour of Velominati? Have you finally sold out to the highest bidder?

If it's true then I'm completely cool with it as long as the next iteration of the V-Kit make me look as mind bendingly awesome as Bernie. If not then, sorry, it clashes a bit with the rest of the palette.

Â Â
Chris says:

Feb 26 2015 at 3:29 pm

@Chris

Oh, it's gone. Carry on. Nothing to see here.
Mikael Liddy says:

Feb 26 2015 at 7:43 pm

@Chris

yeah I was seeing some of that, are you getting some weird ? graphics coming up in the text as well?
frank says:

Feb 26 2015 at 8:05 pm

@Chris @Mikael Liddy

The host was helping me figure out a character encoding problem, and somehow got confused between the production and staging servers; I can't believe they were troubleshooting in production.

Not cool, but things seem to be back to how they were this afternoon.
pistard says:

Mar 2 2015 at 8:52 pm

Text formatting in comments hasn't been working for me since the site's been back online. Safari 7.0.x. Looks legit in the comment box, but styles get stripped upon posting. Just testing:

bold

italic

bold italic

centre justify