beta of unicyclist.org

Finally I can announce the beta of unicyclist.org.
Please read my first post.

The website now is already multiple Gb’s big; over 1100 movies.
The whole setup is made to expand unlimited.
I wrote ALL of the code ALL by myself starting entirely from scratch.
Right now I’m fixing the RSS / RDF / Atom feeds.
These feeds makes it possible to keep up with blogs in a very timesaving and convenient way.
For windows users SharpReader is a very simple nice and clean Agent (and freeware!).
But also Outlook™ seems to do the job nowadays.

My plan is to start in about a week to daily discuss hints on a certain trick.
I’ve invited top unicyclists like Irene Genelin, Dana Schneider, Christian Hoverath, Dustin Kelm,
Teresa & Sem Abrahams, and Kris Holm to
join a kind of panel that will make drafts which will be released for discussion and finally posted.
And off course to write on the blog as well.

Everyone who goes to NAUCC or UNICON please have a look at all 3/3 steps of my standard validator.

Please note it’s all beta. And although I may have a separate development environment I’ll always prefer to code in
the live website. The website validates valid xhtml Strict. When giving feedback about multimedia problems please make
sure you use the latest versions of players before sending any feedback. Currently MAC AOL user may experience
some troubles.

Last but not least: we’ll need your input! Please submit your movies, and pictures. When submitting please realize that
the main purpose of the website is educational, and not to show how many people can ride downstairs.
Also please know there is still a lot of uncutted footage waiting to be added.
If you want to submit files larger than 2Mb please contact me.

Anyway, enjoy your preview.

Re: beta of unicyclist.org

Yawn

Well from what I got to see before the site stopped working for me (basically I read the first post, and watched some great videos) the site is absolutely fantastic and you should be thanked by lots of people lots of times for all the work you’ve obviously put into it…so thankyou.

On a personal note, seeing some of those level 10 skills made me realise for some of them that they are actually doable even for someone like me who hasn’t done a great deal of freestyle. On the other hand, seeing some of the other level 10 skills made me realise how great a rider you are and how bad I am at freestyle. :slight_smile:

I am actually now far more motivated to go out and learn new freestyle skills after seeing part of the site. It looks to me like I’m going to find one foot backwards wheel walking easier than with both feet.

Can anyone tell me how many official level 10 riders there are? I do realise that a lot of people can do all the skills confidently but don’t follow the (American?) skills list, etc, etc.

Congratulations Leo, the site is amazing.

Andrew

Oh yeah, two more things - one I really like the shadow in the title and the way the site is set out so simply in general, and two the ‘THE UNICYCLE BLOG’ title has just moved into an odd position.

Andrew

Re: beta of unicyclist.org

What’s with the personal attack on James Potter in your first post? That’s totally inappropriate.

If your intent is to say that you want the site focused on unicycling and that you don’t want any chatty comments in the blog, then just say so. If you’re reserving the right to delete comments and block users then just say so. But putting up a sign that says “James Potter and his ilk are not welcome here” is way out of bounds.

I found your editorials and comparisons to unicyclist.com kind of confusing, and I’m not sure why you feel you need to knock down other people or web services in promotion of yourself and your own. The conversational aspect of unicyclist.com is attractive and helpful to many people, and the fact you don’t like it doesn’t decrease its value to others.

That said, the video postings you’ve done are fantastic. I could click through that stuff for days. I love the “partial stalker” video with Sem…what a hoot. And specifically, the way you’ve broken down each of the Levels into into unique video clips of each skill is a tremendous resource for those of us that can only aspire to that type of riding.

I like those parts a lot. As for all the other words and editorializing, I’d paraphrase your motto: less preaching, more riding.

I like it, that’s a really cool site :smiley:

Could you please give a few examples of my byte-wasting? Sure, maybe I make a few useless posts in the J.C. forum, but they’re always some type of conversation which is what that forum is used for.

Other than that, you got a spiffy site there!

It looks like a cross between the unicyclist.com forum and Andrew Carters tutorials web site. More like a magazine than a forum or a dictionary. All valid and useful in their own way.

Ideally I’d like the blog to be more about unicycling in general and less about specific gigs, juggling, James Potter etc. but that’s just my oppinion.

Anyway. Thanks for making the site. I can tell it has been a lot of work and I really appreciate it.
I look forward see how it develops.

I could point to 2,5 “less-usefull” post, that were in the same (few) threads I’m in. During my wade to most of your post in the last two months I see I made a terrible wrong conclusion since all other posts were contructive and helpfull.
I need to apologize. I had a total wrong opinion on you. I dropped that paragraph right out.

When you wrote that you proofed I’m not the only one who make wrong conlusions.

As a matter of fact I realize that when (on the IUF meet in Beijing) was agreed that Gilby (fresh in function as maintainer of unicycling.org / RSU ) came up with the webinterface (on unicyclist.com in stead of unicycling.org) he definitly saved the group from dead-bleading in it’s own succes. As I allready wrote I consider unicyclist.com as very usefull. And I appreciate Gilby’s (voluntairy and costfull) initiative a lot! IF I feld the need to promote myself I rather would do that at booking-agencies. If I had spend 1000+ hours on that, I did’nt had time to create what I’ve made for you (not me, I don’t have to proof myself for myself or anyone else: which is one of the reasons I refuse to compete or archive levels officially).

This part made me sad…

but

…that follow-up was great. You got it! That’s what I wanted in the first place.

amen!

“And on the eight day He allowed the unicycle to be invented. And God saw that it was good.”

Oh good, now Gilby won’t get the idea to block me. :slight_smile:
I think you meant Logan_A. though… He rarely posted a useful post. But I think he died, or something…

No, no, no…

Peter van Boekhaut (I’m sorry, that spelling is probably way of - I mean ‘munimanpete’) and I did this (and are still doing this) as a joint project. He did the whole web page-making side of things on his own. I just made some tutorials and gathered and wrote some tips.

Andrew

The site won’t load for me using Mozilla 1.7 or Firefox 0.9. I get an error about an XML parsing error. The site loads fine for me in IE 6. Is it just me? Leo is the last person I would expect to make a site that only works in IE and fails with an error in Mozilla.

I like the site a lot! I got to it after you took out the potter bashing, which I’m glad for, as I don’t really like to see someone bash someone who they’ve never met in the inagural post of a potentially great site. Not to mention, plenty of Potter’s posts are useful. And all the ones that aren’t are in “most replys”, and it’s not like you read that one, so why care? Anyways, when I get DSL my hardrive will soon fill with crazy freestyle vidseos that I’ll never get around to mastering the contents of.

It’s a great site, but I’m curious, why is it devoid of trials or muni? No pictures of them, no posts about them, nothing. Is this just because it’s not quite up yet, or are you just covering freestyle? I’ve found no mention of trials or muni. Just curious. Also, will you be providing any content on unicycle maintainence?

Also, wasn’t it pretty scary 1fww-ing an ice tire?! My calfs can alrerady imagine the learning scars! What next, gliding?

Cheers.

I’m using Mozilla 1.0.1 on Linux. The site usually works, but I suspect the site is dynamic. The error is on the server, I think, not the client. When it doesn’t work, I get an xml parse error as well. I’ll try to check it out on XP today and see what happens. Oh, to watch the vids, I used Safari on Mac OSX.

I’ll offer a few criticisims here. Leo, the only reason I’m offering them is because your site has lots of potential and is off to a good start in the multi-media department, and indexing department.

  1. Change the background. The green is way too dark to make reading pleasant.

  2. Ditch the background shifting logo. I’m gussing it is a flash animation. It doesn’t show up on my linux browser and is a waste of bandwidth, at least consider restricting it to your home page.

  3. Don’t break the back button. When going through the process of creating a Standard Skill routine. I spent forever because If I missed a skill and had to go back a step, I lost all my original choices. If the purpose is to validate ( I never got to that step due to errors ), there must be a way to easily go back and make changes. Printing in pdf format is going to be way cool! If there is an XML error like John mentions, and the error shows up on step two and you can’t go back to start over!

  4. Correct your spelling mistakes. Spelling mistakes are not a sign of coolness unless they are obviously intentional. As the webmaster, you should be using a spell checker. Your guests are allowed to misspell words, We’re all idiot lusers anyway.

  5. Maybe find a way (since I couldn’t complete the 3 steps I don’t know if you did) of saving the routine as an xml file or some file which can be uploaded back to your server and edited in the future.

Overall, you did quite a lot of work to get things setup. Thanks for your effort!

There have been more weird characters like that over here. Sendfairy for exmple. Or Grogboy; a story on it’s own. This kid obviously suffered personal problems. Handing him the positive effects of unicycling would prevent bad things to happen. But I can understand it well the community did not had patience with him. I think in the middle your teen-years the unicycle can become a very good friend of yourself. Personly I received a lot of self-confidence from the unicycle.

xhtml 1.0 Strict is maybe the most compatible but also the most fragile flavour of html.
A single <br> or <BR /> will cause some browers to output nothing at all.
Last night there was a <a href="link" title="text"  title="text">
with as result your browsers not displaying anything.
MSIE still worked because it does not understand xhtml at all
and reads it like if it was regular html.

Simply because I cannot tell you anything on that. As I’m aware of Muni currently being the most popular dicipline I am glad Kris Holm responded enthousiast on my request. I hope it soon will result in a trick by trick page like the other pages.
But I can start adding Muni movies as soon people submit them via the submit page.
If you have any usefull footage you are encouraged to do so

As scary as riding world steepest velodrome (on two wheels in Gent, Belgium). As soon you understand your fully in control (gravity is pretty constant on earth) you can have a go. Besides that I really know how to make UPD’s. Which reminds me to the time when I was in a stuntteam. The leader once asked me “are you scared?” I responded with “Well -eh- I don’t feel fully comfortable” and he said “That’s the best answer to give. If you would have said ‘no’ I would have kicked you out. Because if you are not scared you are kamikaze, and not thinking about the risks you take.”

Hmmm, never considered. Undecided. Maybe later on.

Dynamic is a bit short.
Comparisons like === of variable-variables ($$var)
Dynamicdynamic would fit better.
As I pointed in the post on Anthony Gatto jugglers and unicyclist make excellent coders because of being able to control multiple processes, and thinking flexible and creative.
I wonder what I would able to if I had some more than onlys few very basic math.

I actually think about releasing the blog software since it has a very simple but powerfull setup and can be made compatible with excisting databases.

1 & 2 > Background/colors are personal taste. I will never be able to please all. With 12 images, 1 sheet, 4 splash videos, and 2 other scripts I can (entirely) sidewide change the look and feel completly. Just like Google I have prepared special themes on events like haloween, valentines-day, etc. The first event-theme is allready finished and will run during UNICON.

3 > The broken back button bothers me a lot. I also would like better javascripts on it. It could make it a simple 2 steps But I don’t want javascript or cookies as an dependecy. Also the pdf filesize is yet way too big.

4 > I’m 3D; Dislectic, Dumb, and Dutch
Which means my native language is Dutch. I speak English, German, French and even some Finish. I’ve performed in all those languages.

Most horrible mistake I ever made was dividing friends in boyfriends and girlfriends since there are seperate words for fe/male friend in all mentioned languages… except english.

Opposit I once was not happy when a gay-oriented friend of me introduced me to his neightbour as “his friend” which has in Dutch a meaning which is not really what he tried to express… oups.

I know my grammer sucks more than my spelling does. And that it affects my shows a lot.
But those errors shows I’m human. While using spell checkers expose me better off than I really am.

The moto of Adam Curry his Dutch website is “Spellchecken is for sissies”. While he’s from the USA serious posts on his Dutch Blog more than often turned out into ring-fights of spell-checkers. And so killed a lot of usefull discussions.
I’m teached en-uk but the en-us influence turned me more into en-int:
Saddle or seat?

Teresa saved me from horrible errors during setting up things. I repeatedly wrote “standart” (which is almost Dutch spelling).

But what about Bush today: “as Turkey meets the Human Rights the EU should…”
should have been: “if Turkey meets the Human Rights the EU should…”
If (according Klaas Bill) Rumsfeld rides an unicycle, and Bush make’s lot of language-errors… why can’t I do both?
There a worser things to harm the world. Oups, let’s avoid politics.

Anyway if I validate my css, xhtml, rss, atom, and more I should do spellchecking as well. But that will make editing even more time consuming. Time I need hard on other things.

5 > The script make’s a horrible lot of processes. During the development it sometimes took over 28 seconds.
Have a look at the source… That XML thing is an excellent idea! But uploading stuff is risky business.
I’ve noticed an tremendous boost of cross-site-scripting bug-tracks on port 80 right after the launch.
I even had requests for formmail exploits as explained by me before.
Still I dare to come up with some XML (or like) thing.

Further I appreciate all complaints. I only can eliminate errors if I know the excistance. Please don’t be shy to use the comments field on the post “First post”.

Cool! Things are working in Mozilla 1.7 and Firefox 0.9 now.

I did get an XML parsing error when trying to play the video of Dustin Kelm doing the side ride on a giraffe. And also with Julien doing the sideways seat drag.

The site is very much needed. I’ve been wishing for some place that had video clips of all the different skills. For example, people here have asked questions like what is a side ride. Trying to explain what a side ride is without a video is pretty much pointless.

Leo,

What sorts of muni and trials videos are you looking for? What would you consider useful footage?

Andrew

Well, I guess most of us should be very thankful you didn’t choose one of your other languages to use, except for the videos I would be lost.

Being married to an “English as Third Language” person, I am amazed that anyone could learn and maintain in their heads more than one at a time.

Great effort!

Re: beta of unicyclist.org

john_childs wrote:
> The site won’t load for me using Mozilla 1.7 or Firefox 0.9. I get an
> error about an XML parsing error. The site loads fine for me in IE 6.
> Is it just me? Leo is the last person I would expect to make a site
> that only works in IE and fails with an error in Mozilla.

Works for me in Firefox 0.9, though the colour scheme is quite nauseating.


Danny Colyer (the UK company has been laughed out of my reply address)
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“He who dares not offend cannot be honest.” - Thomas Paine