Motorcycles International is Open!

The main domain is http://www.motorcyclesintl.net

I’m going to go clean my bike and work on the yard, maybe not in that order

The theme development effort on the new Motorcycles International site has reached it’s end and I’ve been working since last night to wrap up all of the details. Primarily coding all the little things that aren’t considered in a project plan.

It is extremely cool to see a long-time dream come to reality!

The only thing left is to upgrade the HelpDesk System, which is something I haven’t done in the past but it should give users something structured to work with.

Issues will be expected, but it’s exciting nonetheless to finally come to the end of a prolonged development step. Unless there are significant problems, the outside world will be made aware next weekend.

Good Times!

We’re almost at the end of eradicating 167 XHTML validation issues on the base template. One of the developers was stuck in the HTML 4.0 world and didn’t remember to apply the current Black Magic. There are two remaining issues identified that should wipe out the remaining errors. When they’re done, we’ll be able to arrange for installation on the production server.

Motorcyclists love to share infobits, pictures, and experiences. Whether it’s blogs, social networking sites, or picture albums; bikers tend to have just as much fun as anyone else.

What we don’t play well with are singular sources of information. So if MotorcycleURLs displayed a group of links from Google News or technorati, there is a solid chance that most of the links listed would:

• be of little or no interest
• if it was of interest, the information would eventually disappear from the site anyway
• couldn’t be learned, because one part may not be as useful on the next visit

When the Motorcycles International Portal goes live, the MotorcycleURLs domains will be pointed to the WebLinks Directory within the portal. If a user wanted to browse or contribute links involving Ducati for example, they will be able to browse and share what excites them.

The layout work was delayed a week, but it is working on the test server. I’ve got the development team working on roughly 23 bugs that won’t be resolved for a few more days. If things go well, it will be installed on the live server at the latter part of this coming week. From there some additional development work will be done.

Microsoft cleared the site from it’s anti-phishing database, which won’t be reflected publicly for another couple days. It seems that anything complex that hasn’t been active throws a yellow-alert on Internet Explorer 7.

Thumbshots isn’t updating as well as I would like, but the weblink thumbnail images they do present are wonderful. The only exception is TriumphRat.Net (my former site), which shows a blank thumbnail.

The HTML Coding work has been completed. The development team is now moving to the CMS Template Coding Phase.

The effort is taking longer than anticipating (even with this new team), but I can’t complain that much – It’s progress. Besides, it allowed me to finish my initial eBay link pages and do some other minor tweaks to the site.

The site won’t be announced until this part is completed.