Duvine

Alisa de Gaspe Beaubien of Duvine also dropped us a note today and while there's only the barest of information started for Duvine at this point, I'm really hoping to spend some time in the coming days getting some tours populated there. We're hoping Alisa will help us out with that!

New ExperiencePlus! Tours

I was happy to see that ExperiencePlus! had touched base again and also added several new tours to the site. Check 'em out!

Bicycle the Best of Provence

Bike Across Italy - Venice to Pisa

Cycling Andalucia

Cycling Assisi and the Best of S. Tuscany

Cycling the Camino de Santiago: Leon to Santiago

Cycling the Camino de Santiago; Roncesvalles to Santiago

Cycling the Coast of Tuscany

Cycling the Dordogne

Venice to Florence

ExperiencePlus!

Today I was contacted by Maria Elena Price of ExperiencePlus! Bicycle Tours asking about adding content to the site. I thought that was pretty cool and am really curious how she discovered the site so quickly. I'm not sure if it's even been indexed by google yet. Anyway, I replied to her and am hoping to hear back. Meanwhile, I built a quick post for them here.

I also figured I might as well create a Facebook page for the site. Facebook has an amazing amount of momentum right now. If you're on the web, you better be on Facebook these days. A profile badge for the page is now part of the 'about' page.

Today's update

I've made several more "fixes" to the underly code to make things work in production more the way they were working in development. And of course I took some time to add a couple tour operators and tours.

Check out Marty Jemison's tours and Bike Vermont to start with. I've added a couple tours I've been on and a couple of quick reviews.

Basic capabilities are working but it's quite clear that, yes, I need to spend some time making it easier to place a tour on the map. That's the most interesting 'flow' in the whole app and could use a little TLC.

Site is alive

I finally got around to hooking up the biketouradvisor.com website today. Quite a number of loose ends to bring together. The DNS changes were pretty straightforward, but google app engine in production turns out to work different enough from the development server that it took half the day to remedy many of the problems. I'm still not sure the problems are all resolved. I just hit the major stuff.

Meanwhile, this blog is only marginally integrated. The layout doesn't match up nor do the fonts. It's kind of a mess I'll need to wade through if I really want them to look the same - or at least more reasonably the same.

App engine does indeed appear to work but wow is it sloooowww. Because the site is not highly trafficked - obviously - the app server only lives for about a min. Then it gets thrown back into cold storage so that most page hits take upwards of 20 to 30 seconds to render. Google's going to need to make App Engine work better than that if they hope to snag many users.

It's a start.