This section of our blog focuses on what we are up to here at the shop. Along with announcements of new products and sales, we talk about the daily grind... errr I mean the 24 hour party here at Bike Shop Hub. We discuss various aspects of being involved in the bicycle industry and talk about the cycling community here in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Here at the Bike Shop Hub we are big fans of collecting photos of the cycling products that we love in use. The Bike Shop Hub Blog is really driven by your photos and stories of your cycling experiences. We specifically are after user photos to publish in the 4 sections of the Bike Shop Hub blog: Bike Trailer Blog, Epic Bike Tours, Bike Tech Blog and Family Cycling Blog. Join us in creating a great resource for cyclists.
Bike-To-Work week is next week and with that in mind, I thought I’d post up a some snapshots of riders riding around Flagstaff this spring. Check out Flagstaff Biking for the full rundown on Bike-To-Work week participation and events. We are proud to be a co-sponsor of this years events and will be active in many of the events and providing plenty of coverage both here and at CommuteByBike.com.
My wife and I enjoy going on weekend tandem rides that wrap up with dinner at some location not to far from our house. Last weekend we went to Sakura a Tepanyaki restaurant at the Radisson Hotel. Not surprisingly, they didn’t offer their guests any bike parking. The stair railing turned out to be a good solution and I thought made for an interest photo.
My online ego has been battered by the posting of the least flattering image of myself that I can imagine. Our blog editor, Ted Johnson, decided to use an image from a recent electric bike photo shoot for a Commute By Bike post about my interview with Diane Lees of Outspoken Cyclist
Along with this ridiculous image of me, which could not be any more embarrassing unless there was some sort of pee stain darkening my pants, my ego was bruised by a blogging cyclist from the Philippines indiscriminately categorizing my interviewing style as goofy.
I’ve decided to litter this post with my favorite photos of myself looking good as my online rebuttal to my self-image crisis. In the Outspoken Cyclist interview, Diane kindly gives me the opportunity to go on and on about my work in the cycling industry and explain our network of specialty cycling webstores and blogs.
Go listen to the interview (starts at minute 42) …… suave or goofy?
I rode into work with my wife last week. It was nice to see that they had decent bike parking facilities for the employees at her new job at NAU’s extended campuses building.
On our trip to the Grand Canyon last weekend, we decided that rather than catching the bus to the start of the Kaibab trail, we’d park and ride the 1 mile rim ride to the trailhead. Folding bikes available in the back of the trunk are excellent for unplanned conveniences and adventures such as this.
My wife and I decided to take a quick weekend getaway to the Grand Canyon. We tossed the Brompton and Bike Friday folding bikes into the trunk of our Corolla thinking we might do a little riding. These bikes turned out to be perfect tools for tooling around the South Rim.
While most of the customers of Bike Shop Hub, are interested in hearing about what we are up to in the realm of our expertise in bike touring, bike commuting, family cycling and increasingly with electric bikes, the tools with which we are presenting this expert knowledge with are worth sharing from time to time as well. Recently we’ve been looking at upgrading two critical systems and have been investigating available open source tools as we like to do.
In the realm of our website CMS (content management system), we’ve been debating back and fourth about WordPress versus Drupal. We really like the robustness and extensibility of Drupal, however it does not offer the out of the box usability of WordPress. WordPress also has a thriving community of users that use it in very similar ways to us. Being able to share with this community is a great resource for us. And we are already WordPress users for our blogging here at CommuteByBike.com, UtilityCycling.org and BikeTrailerBlog.com as well as for supporting the womens bike racing community blog, WomensBikeTalk.com.
With WordPress, we’ve discovered a great interactive theme called Headway. This theme is very interesting because it allows for quite a bit of customization with very little experience in HTML or CSS. Of course if you want to go outside of the parameter that the tool offers, html, css and php programming come into play. From what I’ve seen in exploring quite a few themes for WordPress, there is no easier to use tool to build a custom look with on Headway. There is also a decent community using the tool when you are interested in doing more advanced customizations as well that offer up plenty of guides, tips and tricks. If you are WordPress user of any level, I highly recommend checking out what can be done with Headway. We are currently rebuilding this website in Headway working on adding in dynamic content from our 3 shops, adding sections to this blog, bringing in a forum and setting up a section for the products that we manufacture under the Wandertec brand.
Behind the website presentation, an online retail business like Bike Shop Hub requires a solid inventory accounting system. We’ve been pushing Quickbooks to its limits and really have had quite a bit of trouble with integrating its data with the online shops. We’ve decided to plunge into an upgraded system and began exploring the realm of open source ERPs.
xTuple came to the fore front for us as an accounting system that offered usability that seemed familiar with what was working for us in Quickbooks. xTuple really looks promising in its ability to integrate everything about it into our online shops as needed. And if it doesn’t offer tools we need, unlike Quickbooks, we can customize it as needed.
The usability of xTuple seems like it will allow us to get up and running with it fairly quickly. While xTuple is billed as Open Source, it is really a hybrid of commercial and open source. The basic version, Postbooks, is available for free download, while the more advanced Standard and Manufacturing versions come with a decent price tag. I like this aspect of it as the paid versions of it mean that there is good support for implementation and maintenance as we get underway. In the long term, xTuple seems to offer up alot of useful tools that we can grow into.
Were just getting started with these 2 interesting tools, but hopefully you’ll start to see the results of them here soon. I’ll try to post updates here on how things are going with these two new tools in a few months and please post your questions and/or experiences with Headway or xTuple in the comments below.
