On the bike

Distance: a smidge over 7300km That was ju-ust within a top 1000 finish on bikejournal.com (nicked that idea from Surly Dave).

Riding days: 199

Average daily mileage: 20 km (or 36 km if calculated for riding days only)

Consecutive days riding: 147 (116 of those in 2009)

In February, I proudly announced that I’d done 101 days on the bike, having started on 1 November 2008. I quietly neglected to mention that my run ended on 27 April due to illness.

Days commuting by bike: 123

That exceeds the requirements of the Commuter Cycling Century club on bikejournal.com: “each member attempts to ride to and from work on at least 100 days in a 12-month period”.

Audax mileage: 2935 km

For the 2008/09 Audax season, I rode 14 brevets including 4 permanents. At one per month, I qualifed for the Year Round Randonneur award and a few other merit badges awards. It’s already established that I won’t be scoring the YRR in the current season…

On the blog

Posts: 65, including 29 speedlinking posts

Comments: 174, some of which were not made by me

Thanks to everyone who responded and keep it up.

Top referrers of 2009 (other than search engines)

1. tomw.net.au
2. cyclelicio.us
3. melbournecyclist.com
4. bv.com.au
5. ncrandonneur.blogspot.com
6. bikeradar.com
7. aboutthebike.blogspot.com
8. 4tfingers.biz
9. wurple.net
10. boroondarabug.org

Thanks to all of them and all other referrers.

Most visited pages of 2009

• Take the road or the bike path?
• Basket cases
• Another mudguard hack
• More basket cases
• Swanston Street is crazy

Tweet, tweet

For what it’s worth, Treadly and Me tweeted for the first time 12 months ago today. Please try to contain your excitement.

Posts and comments

There were 95 posts, with March (5 posts) being the leanest month and January (11 posts) being the most prolific. That’s a far cry from the heady days of 2006, when I produced “244 published posts, coming on average one every one and a half days or about twenty per month”, including one month with 33 posts! Was I doing any riding at all back then?!?

People must be visiting because I’m still getting comments. In 2006 comments per post were 1.4, in 2007 it was 3.7 comments per post and (despite a drop off in posts) comments remained at 3.9 per post for 2008. Clearly I’m not Bike Snob NYC, but I do appreciate it when people take the time to leave a note.

Referrers

In 2008 the top 25 referrers were:

• blog@BumsOnTheSaddle.com

• MAKE: blog

• Melbourne Cyclist
  

• Tweed Coast Treadly

• Research Trailer Park

• Cyclelicious

• Surly Dave’s About the bike

• Bennelong Bicyclist Blog

• Sydney Body Art Ride

• wurple

• The Adventures of ShinyShiny and Halfeman

• Pirates of the Burley Griffin

• blogscrement

• kimbofo’s London Cycling Diary

• Boroondara BUG

• pedaller

• Amsterdamize

• Otago Central Rail Trail

• PPE

• Chris’s life cycle

• cfsmtb

• mumswobblings.blogspot.com (appears to be a dead link now)

• Fahrradsozialismus

• vidman’s life cycle

• The story of a bike and a stubborn cyclist

Thanks to everyone here and anyone else who posted a link to treadly.net or otherwise sent interested people my way.

Popular pages of 2008

The top five pages of the year were:

• Hysterical moments in bicycle design—the surprise popular page of the year, thanks to a link from MAKE: blog.

• In praise of power-assisted bikes—do you look down (just a little bit) on power-assisted bikes? Maybe you shouldn’t.

• I’m detraining—what happens when you stop exercising and start detraining.

• Psssssst off—after a crazy run of punctures, I shared a few thoughts on repairing flat tyres.

• Now that’s a cool bike—and you thought scooters were for kids…

If I’d made a guess, it certainly wouldn’t have included all of those!

My stats

Now that I’ve finally pulled my finger out and started recording my mileage, I can report a few things about my riding.

Firstly, the embarassing fact that I only rode 168 days in 2008, that’s less than half the year. Hmm, room for improvement there.

As I generally count the return journey on commutes as a separate ride, I had 269 outings at a mean distance of 22.5km per ride (standard deviation 24.01, for the stats nerds) for a total of just over 6000km (or 3700 miles). Two rides were of more than 200km, five rides of 100–200km, and 13 rides of less than 10km (hey, it’s still riding). A mere five Audax rides among the lot—must improve that one in 2009!

Some of the topics

Apart from topics like bike commuting, utility cycling, and cycling in general, other items of discussion included:

• bike lanes in the City of Melbourne
• the Eastlink Path upgrade (Doc Homebrew’s pet gripe for much of the year)
• the Hell Ride came up for discussion again (but if I can help it I really don’t want to talk about it again in 2008 or beyond)
• the mangement (or otherwise) of Melbourne’s public transport
• my self-inflicted knee injury

Speedlinking

I started speedlinking in August. The idea was just to beef-up my occasional Friday photo with a more regular collection of stuff I’d recently found interesting. Talk about lazing blogging… Anyway I hope readers have found those entries interesting also; a handful of comments suggest that at least a few people are reading them.

treadly.net

Also around August I switched this site to its own domain: treadly.net. Please change your bookmarks if you’re still pointing to the old address.

Referrers

I’ll tip the helmet to more referring sites this year (mainly because there were more). The top thirty referrers for 2007 appear to have been:

1. cyclelicio.us
2. Spinopsys
3. commutebybike.com
4. Tweed Coast Treadly
5. goclipless.com
6. Surly Dave
7. planetcycling.org
8. pedaller
9. Bike Iowa
10. Chris L
11. My Bicycle Musings
12. Narragansett Bay Wheelmen
13. Vidman
14. bikeyear
15. London Cycling Diary
16. revrunnerusa.blogspot.com [404]
17. Adrian Fitch
18. tucorides
19. Wheels of Justice
20. Marvellous Melbourne
21. melbourne.metblogs.com
22. blog.bumsonthesaddle.com
23. cycle life
24. Crowlie
25. Research Trailer Park
26. Spacing Toronto
27. Rhys Smith
28. cfsmtb
29. Wikipedia
30. bikesfortransportyeah

It’s interesting that some of these sites sent a large number of links on one topic (e.g. Spacing Toronto, Wikipedia), while others sent small numbers on a large range of topics (e.g. Spinopsys, London Cycling Diary). Anyway, thanks to all of them and, not neglecting the Long Tail, even bigger thanks to to anyone who has posted a link to this site somewhere else on the ‘net (e.g. the folks who posted links to treadly.net on forums like BV Forums, cyclingforums.com.au, and Treehugger).

Predictions and predilections

For 2008 I’ll not be so bold as to repeat my prediction of a dozen posts per month, although it would be nice to think we could sustain that.

I hope that speedlinking will continue on a regular basis, maybe not weekly but we’ll see how it goes. And maybe I can think of a less naff name for it.

I didn’t get to anywhere near as many Audax brevets as I wanted to in 2007, but I want to reverse that trend in 2008. So look out for the occasional brevet report.

I’ll also have another new topic of discussion in the New Year. There will probably be more on that in the next few days…

Thanks

And so it only remains for me to hand out a few more thanks:

To Doc Homebrew, who increased his output of posts incredibly this year. I’m looking forward to hearing about his exploits over a new and quite different commuting route in 2008, but not holding my breath for the same number of contributions.

To Kirsty Altis, who kindly allowed me to reproduce her essay Two-Wheeled Love Affair—if you missed it back in April, do yourself a favour and give it a read.

To all the readers and commenters, especially those who (against all probability) keep coming back. I love hearing from you guys, keep it up.

Best wishes for 2008—and naturally that means a year filled with plenty of good cycling.

Well my dire prediction that this blog would be quietly dropped and forgotten by Australia Day did not come to pass. And as the lazy days at the end of December seem to be given over to reflection, let me reflect…

Numbers first

Including this one, there are 244 published posts, coming on average one every one and a half days or about twenty per month. There are 337 comments—a few of which I did not write…

November was my leanest month with only ten posts. January was the bumper month with 33 posts, closely followed by May with 30. Those halcyon days we are not likely to see again in the near future!

Some of the issues

I had no real idea what I’d write about when I started, but I’ve been pretty pleased with how things turned out. In no particular order, here is a (hopefully) representative sample of the territory that’s been covered this year:

• commuter challenges

• cycling road trauma

• the death of James Gould

• “Copenhagen-style” bike lanes

• bike theft

• photo journals and videos of commuter routes, and

• the opinions of clueless “celebrities” (e.g. Sam Newman, Miranda Devine, Nigel Havers, Ken Livingstone).

Trivia

A few factoids from the stats logs:

• In July the second-largest referer of traffic to this blog was—of all sites—Disney. I kid you not. I still don’t know why and I never had traffic from them again.

• Of late, the most common search term that brings traffic to this site is “runway lights”—but I’m trying to fix that! Other search terms that feature often include “piaggio ape”, “ms devine”/”miranda devine”, “hilary harper”, “bike messengers”, “how to steal a bike”, and “cycling is the new golf”.

• I was a bit surprised recently to get a referral from Google search results on the search term penis extension video. It appears that this site currently holds the third position for that search term—a singular and rather dubious honour for a cycling blog, I would have thought. The guys at Google must get a real laugh out of the things people search for…

Where to from here?

I’m not making too many plans for the blog—I don’t see any reason to change my approach now. I reckon I’ll be happy to continue at the recent output rate of about a dozen posts per month.

I have decided to stop regularly commenting on road trauma because I’ve found that it takes more time and gives more emphasis than my interest in the topic warrants. I’m ever hopeful that I won’t be provoked into ranting about hit-and-run crimes again, but it’s a pretty forlorn hope.

It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to follow the media coverage of cycling as closely in 2007, but I still hope to keep across the major issues when they arise. We’ll see, I guess.

Other than that, the content will continue to follow whatever whimsy my mood takes me. If you’ve got any suggestions please let me know.

Thanks

A good six months ago Phil handed out a few digital hugs, and it’s well overdue for me to do likewise. So thanks go out to the following bloggers whose sites have referred the most traffic here:

1. pedaller

2. Phil Gomes

3. The Squeaky Cyclist

4. The Cycling Dude

5. Surly Dave

6. Andrea Casalotti

7. Long 鬃 goat 哺 grass 會 Shelves (Japanese)

8. Graham Tracey

9. schmadzie

10. kimbofo

I also note with thanks the recent guest entry made by Paul N of Adelaide.

And, of course, thanks to all who link here, read here, and particularly to those who leave comments here—it wouldn’t really be a blog without you all.