By tott on

velospace.org is an online bike community, a place for people to share bikes and photos. I have been working on since about Thanksgiving 2005.

I spent a good three to four months learning the "Drupal-way" and hacking core modules and writing my own code to achieve what you see on the site today. It was a very steep learning curve for the first three to four weeks, and then things really fell into place. The hardest/most fun hack I did was to get watermarking and thumbnail generation into flexinode-image (I encourage hotlinking of hosted photos, but wanted to include a small watermark).

At this point the site is just about feature complete for this release. I am planning on working up a load of heavy-duty "friends" features this summer, along with a few other community oriented features, which will be the next major milestone for the site. I wrote the friends system from scratch - it is social networking on the simplest level at this point. Users can bring any bike node into their friends list. As of today (6/6/06) I have about 400 users who have made more than 1300 friend connections amongst over 300 bikes on the site.

I recently officially launched the site with a fresh design. I was lucky enough to hook up with a graphic designer who has an eye for catchy looks. Thanks for checking out the site, any comments are greatly appreciated!

Comments

StevenSokulski’s picture

StevenSokulski commented

Looks fantastic. Very well themed.

Just out of curiosity did you contribute any of the thumbnail or watermark code? Its the generosity of skilled folks such as yourself that gets this features added.

Good luck with the new site!

tott’s picture

tott commented

Thanks for the comments. The code is so ugly at this point that I couldn't release it without some major cleanup. Later this summer I will take a stab at making it worthy for submission

tott’s picture

tott commented

Three-and-a-half-year update:

velospace is still up and running on Drupal. Now we are up around 21,000 registered users, 11,000 bikes, and a whopping 147,000 friend connections.

I'd like to thank the Drupal community for all the help over the years - there have been many updates, bug fixes, and features that I've been able to take care of only because of the help from all of you.