A while ago, I wrote about some concerns of mine regarding git and github. Today, I was looking around, because I wanted to add the exception_notification code to a site of mine, and ran into this:

http://github.com/rails/exception_notification/network

Scroll all the way to the right, and you’ll see that there are a bunch of relatively current forks, and none of them seem to share recent changes. So which one is the ‘real’ one? My guess would be the one belonging to ‘rails’, but who knows… maybe that one has been abandoned?

Once again, this is nothing ‘new’: it has always been possible to fork open source code. What I wonder about is the mentality of just going off to work on your own stuff without contributing anything back. The results are a bunch of different forks, each of which may potentially contribute something interesting, but none of which appears to have collected all the new work.

Bicycle racing, especially professional road cycling, is really the only sport I follow, but I do so with a passion. Other people are glued to the TV during soccer games, or football, or basketball, or cricket, or whatever. I’m there during the current spring classics season (my favorite races of the year), and the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France.

So it was a cool discovery to find people like Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, George Hincapie, Robbie McEwen and others using Twitter. Some of them really provide a unique window into the life of a professional bike racer, especially all the things that we don’t see outside race day.

I figured that if it’s interesting to me, it’s probably interesting to other people too, so I put together this site to aggregate twitter updates related to professional cycling:

http://www.bikechatter.com

As an extra, I also added a chat widget from Mibbit.com, in order to make it easy to chat with others while races are going on:

http://www.bikechatter.com/chat

The next race is the Amstel Gold classic, in the Netherlands, today (Sunday April 19th), at about 15:30 CEST (Rome, Paris, Berlin, etc…). Feel free to join us!

The site is quite new, and probably has a few bugs, and as is obvious, my UI ideas are to make things very simple and direct, so any comments or suggestions on how to improve it, or new features you’d like to see are welcome.

… and now I’m off for my Sunday bike ride – see you this afternoon!

Ok, so everyone knows that, but I was particularly surprised. LangPop.com got on the front page of Hacker News the other day and I got a ton of hits. But virtually no one clicked on the advertisements – just a few clicks for many thousands of page views. Some of my other sites, which are of a more general-interest nature, do way better with far fewer visitors.

Not that I’m really complaining, I did langpop.com for fun, but it’s a good reminder that it’s a lot better to produce and sell things to a more general audience. Programmers expect, and largely get, most everything for free – me included.