News

Hiawatha Bicycling Clubs members can register for TOUR D,AMICO (www.tourdamico.org) at a discounted price of $36. ($33 if you mail the form)

To register follow the steps below:

(1) Go to our web site www.hiawathabike.org 

(2) Login to your account 

(3) Choose the members tab, half way down the middle is a link for member registration.

 See you on the 4th!

2015 Ride Leader Award Requirements Announced

The board has announced the requirements for the 2015 Ride Leader (Etoile du Nord) awards.  They can be found on the News page or by following this link:

http://hiawathabike.org/News/3342465

In brief, the requirements are:

1. Lead 5 or more rides, one of which must be on a weekend.
   
2. Serve the club by volunteering in one of the following ways:
   
• Volunteer at TDA
• Be a Team Leader 
• Serve on the HBC Board
3. Ride 1000 miles on club rides or participate in 35 HBC Rides. 
   

These awards are meant to recognize the “stars” of our club — those members who devote time and energy to making HBC a success.  So when you see someone wearing an Etoile du Nord jersey, recognize them for what they are.  A true “Star of the North”.

April Ride Statistics are Published!

I finally got the Ride Stats reports for April published.  You can access them under the “RideStats” menu item on the web site.  There are several reports available:

• If you click on the “RideStats” menu item, you will see the dashboard for the previous month (April).  This dashboard will tell you how many rides we did in April, how many were cancelled, how many were fast/medium/slow rides, which rides had the most participants, and who rode the most miles in the last month.
  
• The “Top 20” Report.  This report lists the top 20 male and female rides, both in terms of the number of miles and the number of rides, as well as the top 20 ride leaders.
  
• “Last Month’s Ride List” lists all the rides that occurred in the last month, sorted by date.  Ride Leaders, if you led a ride during the past month, it should be listed here.  If it isn’t please contact Carol Belair or Leon Webster.
  
• The "Year to Date Dashboard” is a report on the rides so far in 2015.  It is similar to the monthly dashboard, except it shows how many rides we have done in 2015, which rides had the most riders, and the mileage leaders for 2015.  
  
• Just under these reports are the 2014 Mileage Reports.
  
• Lastly, if you want to see how many miles you have ridden, look under the “Members” menu for the “MyRides” report.  you will see two tabs — one for 2014 and one for 2015.  If you click on the 2015 tab, you should see a list of rides that you have participated in, through May 5, along with some bar charts at the bottom showing your month to month progress, and comparing your mileage this year to previous years.  
  

We hope you find these reports useful.  If you have ideas for improving them, please let us know and we will pass them along to Michele Brougher who is the creator of the Ride Stats program.  Also, many thanks to Carol Belair for helping to make these reports accurate, and for entering ride reports for many ride leaders.  

The stats will be a bit late next month since I will be out of town until the 18th...

New Ride Leader Resources Page!

John and I have been working on a new Ride Leader Resources Page.  We hope that you will find it to be useful.  Mostly we re-arranged the content on the previous page but there are some changes:

• We now have the most current version of the ride leaders manual available directly from the page.
  
• There is a link to a page which has sunrise/sunset times for any day of the year. 
  
• There is a link to WeatherBug which will give you the current forcast
  
• We have added some words on the page to help new ride leaders understand the process better.  If you have ideas as to how we can improve this page further, we would greatly appreciate your input.  
  

Cycling Savvy Classes

HBC Ride Leader and Past President, John Hardy, will be joining Hokan from the Minnesota Bicycle Alliance to teach Cycling Savvy again this summer.  There are three classes, one starting on June 12, one starting on July 10, and one starting on August 14.  Each session consists of three sessions.  The Friday Evening Class will familiarize students with bicycle specific traffic laws and traffic dynamics.  Students will discover that that bicycle drivers are equal road users with the right and ability to control their space.  On Saturday mornings, there is a 3 hour class meeting in a parking lot which will increase your bike handling skills.  The 3rd class, on Saturday afternoon will get you out on the road to put your new skills to use in real life situations.  You must complete the first two sessions before you can take the 3rd session.  

For more information, or to register,  go to www.cyclingsavvy.org and use the “Find A Course” link at the top of the home page.  These courses have gotten rave reviews from past students, and are highly recommended. 

Photos Needed — Please?

Remember that we are sponsoring an HBC photo contest.  The person who submits the best photo of an HBC ride or event to the HBC Website or the HBC Facebook page between April 1 and November 1 will win a $50.00 gift certificate to OneTen Bicycles.  So get your camera or cell phone out and start snapping!   We will feature the photos on our home page in the “slide show” gadget, and provide proper recognition at the annual meeting / banquet.  Also, if you would like to be a judge for this contest, please contact Leon Webster, who will be forever grateful for your efforts.  

That's all for now folks.  Ride carefully and be safe out there. 

Leon 

The HBC board has set the requirements for the 2105 Etoile du Nord Award. 

These awards are meant to recognize the stars of our club -- those who devote  time and energy towards making HBC a success.  To earn an award in 2015, you must meet these requirements:

1. Lead at least 5 rides, one of which must be on a weekend.
2. Serve the club in a volunteer capacity:
• Volunteer for TDA
• Be a team leader
  
• Serve on the HBC Board
3. Ride at least 35 rides or 1000 miles.
   

March Ride Statistics are available

Earlier this week, I posted the ride statistics through March.  If you have ridden between November 1, 2014 and March 31, 2015 you should see your rides reflected in the statistics.  

Just as a reminder, there are two kinds of statistics.  The first are the "public" statistics which are available for everyone to look at.  They can be found under the "RideStats" Menu item on the web page.  There are three web pages with 2015 statistics:

• "Last Month's Rides" which shows how many rides we had last month, the breakdown by category (slow, vs medium, vs fast), The rides with the most riders, and the riders who rode the most miles last month
• "Year To Date Rides" which shows approximately the same information, but for the year to date.
• "Top 20" which shows the top 20 riders in terms of miles (both for men and women), the top 20 riders in terms on number of rides, and the top ride leaders.

In addition, there are some pages showing similar information for 2014. 

Your personal ride information can be found under the "Members" menu item by choosing the "My Rides" option.  You will see two tabs, one for 2014, and one for 2015.  By clicking on the 2015 tab, you should see a list of rides you have done this year, and how you are doing compared to last year.  

Subscribe to the HBC Ride calendar

You might have noticed that you can now see the next five rides listed on the right hand side of the Home page.  At the bottom of that list, you will see a small "add" button, with a "drop down" arrow.  if you click on the drop down arrow, and then scroll down a bit, you can add the HBC ride calendar to your Outlook Calendar, Google calendar, Apple calendar or another plain text calendar.  if choose to do that, you will have the ride calendar available wherever you have your calendar available.  For example, I added the HBC calendar to my Apple Calendar.  As a result, I now have the ride calendar available on my laptop, and on my iPhone.  when I click on an event, I get a description of the event and a link to the page describing the ride.  It makes it easy for me to check on the ride location, and make sure I know about all the HBC Rides. 

See the Weather Report on the HBC Calendar

If you scroll to the bottom of the "Rides" page, you will see that John has added a banner with the weather report and the forecast for the next few days.  There are also tabs you can select for information about the wind, sun and uv levels.  Buttons at the bottom will show you the current radar, the satellite view and the times for sunrise/sunset   In short, it is about everything you could want to know about the weather.

HBC Photo Contest

I am trying to encourage HBC Riders and Ride Leaders to submit photos of our rides to both the Facebook Page (you have "liked" us on Facebook, right?) and the gallery of photos on the Home page.  To that end,  a $50.00 gift certificate to OneTen bicycles will be given to the person who submits the best photo of a 2015 ride.  Send your submissions to Leon@leonwebster.com.  I will be announcing the panel of judges in the next month.

A couple of announcements:

First, the stats on the web page now reflect the January rides. So if you rode during January, that should now be reflected in your “MyStats” page, and on the ridestats pages for 2015.

Secondly, if you are a ride leader, you will notice that you can not enter location data for any ride that you are trying to schedule. John and I are aware of the problem. I am traveling and don’t have consistent internet access, but John will be working on a fix to the problem. We apologize for any inconvenience.

As I said, i am traveling, and as a result the March updates to the website will be a bit late — look for them about St. Patrick’s day.

best,

Leon

i wanted to let you know about some changes to the HBC Website that John Zeiss and I have done.

First, and foremost, the redistills for 2015 ride year through December are now available. So if you were one of the brave souls who rode during November or December, those stats are now available.

Second, there is a new feature of the web site that we hope you will like. If you look under the members menu item, you will see a page labeled “My Rides”. There are currently two tabs on this page, one for 2014 and one for 2015. The 2014 tab has a list of all your rides, the ride date and time, the distance and whether or not you were a rider or a leader. At the bottom of the page is a summary that says how many rides you did, your total miles and the total number of rides you led. If you rode in November or December, you will see similar information for the 2015 ride year. If, like me, you havent ridden yet, you will see a page that says “page not found”. Over time, John and I will be adding tabs for 2013 and 2012.

Third, we have implemented a forum feature for topics you may want to discuss with other members of the club. The forum is open to all members and located just under the Members menu item (right after the directory). The forum was always there, but we have made it easier to find and opened up the posting to everyone. We think the forum will be an ideal place to give a thumbs up to that club member who led a great ride, or stopped to help you fix the flat on last week’s ride. It would also be a good place to ask questions like “Does any one have a fat bike and what do they think of it?” There is a small checkbox at the top right that is labelled “Subscribe”. If you check it, you will get email updates when some one posts to the forum, so you will know there is something interesting there.

Lastly, we have also opened up the “news’ feature of the software so that team leaders and board members can post news to members of the club. If it right there under “News” on the main menu. Eventually, we would like to get away from these emails, and move towards posting this information as “news”. But the News feature could and should also be used by board members and team leaders to disperse information to the general membership. For example, it would be a great place for Mr. Dean to post the notices about the board meetings and the agenda. The main advantage of news over emails is that the news will persist and be available to members who join us after the email is sent. Members can comment on the news, but this really meant to be more of a one way communication vehicle, as opposed to the forum which is a place for more dialog. There is a small button in the upper right hand corner labeled ‘RSS’. If you click that button you will get updates when someone posts some news.

John and I hope you find all these changes useful. We have more updates coming in the next few weeks. In any case, we would like your feedback. If you have some feature that you think would really be useful, let us know and, if we agree, we will put it on the list.

"No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy" is a famous phrase by German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke back from 1861.

This is just as true in software development - I can crudely paraphrase this into "No software design survives the contact with the realities of technology and actual users". I have seen this time and again over the last 15 years in my career,.

The preceding observation was recently made by Dmitriy Buterin, the developer of our membership software application, in Wild Apricot Software News - April 2012.

Make it 50 years for me if one occasionally substitutes "tool" or "product" for software.

Dmitiy knows what he is talking about from his experience as Chief Apricot for Wild Apricot.  We have seen similar issues. He goes on to mention illness (yes, more than once on our project) and when one programmer just doesn’t have the skills (yes, more than once on our project) and so forth.

We are now nearing the completion of the HBC and TDA websites and can hopefully say the enemy has been vanquished. All of this happened because of the support provided by: Dmitiy, and all the other Apricots (yes that’s what they call themselves); Michele Brougher, for the ride statistics application; the support staff at iPage, host for the TDA and HBC Backroom sites; and Jenna and Arlen, at Seed Development Network, for the calendar.

 

If you are one of the 50% of our members who have not setup your profile PLEASE do so. When you do many wonderful features will be yours:

•   Individualized privacy controls on a field-by-field basis.
•   A membership directory accessible only to club members.
•  You can see when your membership is up for renewal and renew online.
• Mass or controlled e-mail blasts.
• A private members Forum and an open Blog.
• A separate Events (big deals) and Rides only calendar.
• Email members from this site.
• Quick sign in on rides with your alias.
• Your personal Ride Stats emailed to you.
• You can even post your picture so club members will recognize you if they don't know your name.