Why?   Please explain more.

There are about 90 rides listed on the new site and about 250 on the old one.
I'd love to see all of the old rides added to this new site and perhaps allow dated notes so that riders could evaluate whether the ride is still feasible.

None of my rides are on the new site. (am I supposed to add all of my rides from last year?)

Perhaps the better question to ask is: why not save older club info? Is it problematic? Expensive?
These rides give history to the club.

Old rides are old rides.  Personally, I do not see any reason to save them as the ship has sailed and if you weren't on it your'e not getting on now. 

Ride data is saved differently now and it would take some programming and testing to transfer data from the old system to the new as mentioned on the home page of this site. 

If you want to enter old rides on this site be my guest.

Cheers,
Will

So, I guess the handy-dandy cell phone lookup for cuesheet central goes away, too. Pity. 

<rhetorical>So, what does the BBC offer that can't be found at any other club?</rhetorical>  Looks like all the "goodies" have gone away.

bob wagner wrote:

...These rides give history to the club...

Will wrote:

...Personally, I do not see any reason to save them as the ship has sailed and if you weren't on it your'e not getting on now...

If you are a frequent ride leader, or not, or a new ride leader, seeing what rides were led in the past for a given week is very helpful for posting new rides.
It has nothing to do with wishful recollection of past rides.  It is everything about looking forward.

I did not realize until I read Bob's message that the old cue sheets (and old rides) were not transferred to the new site.

While I do understand that it may be difficult to do this transfer and that it might take more than some quality beer to make it worth Will's time to do it, it seems highly desirable to save for the next five years at least (not forever!) all of the history of the club we can.

For me this means saving all of cuesheetcental.com AND the old yahoo Forum.

Should we not, where it is easy, just keep the old stuff around as a resource and point to it from the new site?

Some remarks on each of these historical items:

The old yahoo bbc forum: I know that there is NO cost involved in maintaining this.  Forums on Yahoo continue to exist for years with no ones effort. Just don't delete it and point to it.

the old cuesheetcentral.com: Phil: is there any labor involved, any significant labor that would keep you off your bike, in keeping this software functioning, without enhancing it at all?  (Currently it does not seem to work by the way. I tried to pull out one the cuesheetcentral cuesheets to compare it to a new version on the new site and I could not get it.)

If there is substantial effort in just keeping this old cuesheetcentral running, is there any way to dump out the key parts of it in a form that they can be reference?  Can we have a new database of the rides? a directory full of the old cues?  Something?

I think these decisions about throwing away the history of the club or keeping it should be made by the BBC board--not just by Will.  I hope it is working that way. But Will is a volunteer (I assume he is not being paid) and I fully sympathize with his saying: too much work for me. I don't care about that history. If you want it, get someone else to do it.

I volunteer to help with any efforts to maintain this history. It is not my intention to push work on Will who has done a remarkable job with the new site.

(And I will probably call on rando Bob for help.)

ed

I was thinking that it was more common for ride leaders to reference other's rides in making new ones. It's a critical resource for me. When I design new rides I look at cuesheet central, bikely and other club's ride libraries. This info is important because I don't know what the roads are like in Lancaster PA or Anacostia in DC. I need local experts. Frederick Pedalers, WABA, etc. are the only experts I can rely on. My ride might be 100 miles, but if I can use a local commuter's 10 mile route to get me through west Frederick safely, I really appreciate it.

I am not asking the club/Will to do more work. I was only wondering why we are taking the effort to delete a worthwhile library. Club history is not just some cute fascination for me. It is helpful information- just as helpful as new information. And saving information is what computers do best.

-Bob

Hi All,

Keeping cuesheetcentral running is not that big a deal. I am intending to do some experimental things WRT different ways of organizing rides, etc., now that the pressure is off to keep everything running 24/7.  So (particularly if the roads remain crappy) look for some new things popping up. I'll let people know on the forum when I have something for folks to try out.

Now, about how to get the data from cuesheetcentral into the BBC website. As I see it, there are two issues, first are all the old rides (which is very useful when figuring out what to lead, I agree), and the second is getting all the cuesheets stored. (Warning, the following is quite technical)

1) Getting ride information into the BBC DB. This is pretty straightforward, but it does require some coding. Both BBC and cuesheetcentral use a mySQL database to store ride information in tables. The structure of the tables is different, but the data is similar enough  to transfer. The easiest way to do this is for cuesheetcentral to expose the ride history in an XML fromat RESTfully. Then a (PHP?) script on the BBC server needs to run that gets the file, reads it and sticks the rides in the BBC DB. The only problem is that SystemSource doesn't provide a shell account for Will to run these programs, so they will have to run the script (personally, I think the BBC needs to upgrade to a shell account.). Then the ride history gets in, and we can even still use cuesheetcentral to add rides if we want.

2) Moving cuesheets. This is tricker, since the cuesheets on cuesheetcentral are stored as files in a directory (that's why links work), while rides are stored in the BBC DB as BLOBS (I think). So either cuesheetcentral can expose an XML catalog of all rides that the BBC server can then read and then grab the referenced file (reasonably tricky), or we can add a page that lists the rides on cuesheetcentral. Additionally, the cuesheet directory could be ftp'd to the BBC server. That gives a way of reaching all the old files with a lot less work on Will's part.

At some point in the future, I'd like to get some tighter integration between the cuesheetcentral code and the BBC site. This may be tricky, since Joomla is mostly PHP/javascript, and cuesheetcentral is Flex/actionscript/flash. Still, there appears to be some work in that direction: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f … ;t=279084. For cuesheetcentral to be completely integrated, the BBC site would *have* to have a shell account. I log in to touch things at least twice a week.

Thoughts?

Phil

I have written to both Will and Phil about the future of BBCTalk and cuesheetcentral. The status of these programs will be a Board meeting agenda item in March.
BBCTalk will be replace by the forums. If you subscribe to a forum(s) , you can receive an email on your iPod or smartphone. My guess is that until the club shuts down BBCTalk, a lot of members will not make the switch to the forums.
Cuesheetcentral is more problematic. I really like getting an email of the next two days rides and I really like the smartphone applet that puts the entire schedule in a simple column that I can access with my Blackberry. The issue of the past history of rides as a guide to decide which ride to lead in the future had not occurred to me. It seems a good feature and losing it would not be helpful.
I have posted my upcoming rides for March on both cuesheetcentral and the new ride calendar. What I miss in the new ride schedule that I have in cuesheetcentral, is going to the library, picking a ride, and clicking on "lead it" and then having only to put in the date/time.  Will has assured us that the cuesheetlcentral  library will be copied to the new web site before cuesheetcentral is closed.
What I would like to suggest to Will and Phil is keeping cuesheetcentral for the indefinite future and use it as a 2nd PORTAL post rides to the new web site. In other words, a member could post rides on either CSC or the new website and the posting would appear on both programs. I have no idea of how complicated the programming would be; if it is very difficult, it would be a killer to the idea. The other problem, of course, is that maintaining CSC will slow down the use of the new ride schedule. While I find the calendar view of the ride schedule very  nice, the are a lot of appealing features of CSC in posting rides, finding rides and reading the ride schedule on a portable phone that I am really reluctant to give up.

Ed Cahill
BBC Secretary