I don’t normally write stuff here about the site design but regular readers will have noticed a change to the header to accommodate an upcoming rides panel, which pulls in events from Upcoming.org.

Upcoming is a nifty site from Yahoo! which lets you post details of events and provides a means of posting questions and comments about it. I’ve set up a Muddymoles mountain bike ride group on Upcoming which I’ll tag our rides with so the details will appear on this site too.

Anyone else can add rides and associate them with our group too, and they’ll also be displayed here.

If you plan to attend a ride just click the link to the event and tick to let us know, there’s an added benefit that we can then mail all attendees. So if rain stops play or there’s some other issue we can email you to let you know. Signing up is free and painless but if you already have a Yahoo! ID (maybe you’re a Flickr user?), you can just use that.

After events we can tag any Flickr pics and they’ll be associated with the event which is a nice touch.

Design wise, the new panel here you see is far from perfect but will suffice as a hasty cobble togther. Following recent feedback—on top of a sneaking suspicion for some time—I think we all agree the previous Google Calendar method of publicising rides left something to be desired.

Having said that, we do have a steady stream of new riders (which we want to continue to encourage) so the idea of letting people know what we’re up to is worthwhile. Hopefully this will prove more transparent, allow the opportunity for more interaction and be quicker reacting.

Look out for further design tweaks in the next few weeks which will sort out the loose ends and hopefully make this site easier to use. If anyone has any thoughts about that or the Upcoming group, let me know.