May 2010 – northlandboy…and his girl

Last Saturday was a superb morning, clear skies, no winds, just a touch cool. Perfect for mountain biking. So, dog in tow, we headed out to Woodhill. Nice riding, things going well, just one problem – there had been quite a bit of rain over the previous days.

Came racing down the hill, up to a wooden obstacle that I’ve gone over before, going a bit fast, OK hit the brakes a touch, whoops, the wood’s wet, the bike slips out, and things all go horribly wrong.

Next thing I’m lying on the ground, the bike is several feet away, wheels spinning, Samson the dog is checking me over, and yet remarkably all my limbs are still working. A few minor bruises, a bit of a rest needed, then we go to set off. Hang on, the chainring doesn’t look right – should be it be in two pieces?

Not cheap to replace either, $135, since they only had an XT ring available. Could have been worse, could have been me snapped in two

I’ve finally gotten around to moving my blog across to WordPress. This was triggered by Blogger dropping FTP support, but really, I should have done this a long time ago.

As you can see, it tidies up the look a lot. Yes, the Cutline theme is frightfully common, but too bad, it’s a nice clean look. I do quite like the rotating image across the top of the page – every time you reload, or click on a new page, you’ll see a new image. You can use the Tags on the right hand side to choose all posts related to a country I’ve been to, and when you’re reading a post, there will always be a link to the next and previous posts. This will make it far easier navigating the older posts.

All the old content is still there, but in a new format. You should still be able to post comments, etc, but you won’t be using Google logins – you can just enter whatever details you like.

There will be problems, not least of which is that I’ve moved the base links around – instead of having the blog at northlandboy.com/blog, it is now going to be at northlandboy.com/- this will affect your bookmarks!

RSS feeds have also changed – this is now at http://northlandboy.com/feed. If you are reading this via the old RSS feed, you must update your reader now, or it will not receive any new posts.

Any problems, please let me know, so I can get it fixed ASAP.

Still to come: Interactive route maps, perhaps with links to posts and pictures. At some point my older photos will get moved to Picasa, to make slideshows easier. I’m also going to put together a “highlights” slideshow.