crazyguyonabike - A place for bicycle tourists and their journals

About crazyguyonabike


Website Copyright © 2000 - 2009 By Neil Gunton 
Copyrights for journals and articles are retained by the individual authors. 


Overview

Hi! I am Neil Gunton, the founder/programmer/webmaster/editor of crazyguyonabike.com. This is a free, independent website for hosting bicycle touring journals, forums and resources. The content is contributed by people from all over the world. You can browse the journals and articles orregister and then create your own. Also check out the forums (message boards), reviews (users' reports on bicycle touring gear), resources (links, routes, hospitality, businesses and other useful info related to bicycle touring) and classifieds (companions, for sale, wanted etc). You can find interesting content via serendipity, or see what other users think is cool (or controversial) via the ratings.
Crazyguyonabike's main strength is its simple focus on bicycle touring, combined with a scalable design which allows for a huge amount of content to be easily edited, browsed and searched. Unlike many other Web 2.0 sites, crazyguyonabike actually hosts real content, rather than simply acting as a link aggregator to point to other websites. Also, the design is deceptively simple and non-flashy, which makes it fast and easy to use on slow connections and portable computers. Finally, of course, the community itself makes crazyguyonabike special. The site would be nothing without all the people who contribute their content to make this one of the biggest repositories of bicycle touring literature in the world.
The website is supported by donations and corporate sponsors; see the sponsors page for details. The website section has lots more info on how to use the site, including a sitemap, comprehensive help and a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions).

History

I started crazyguyonabike in January 2000 as a simple online journal of my own 1998 bicycle tour across America. This was the original (and only) journal on the website, and it was appropriately titled "Crazy Guy on a Bike". So the name of the website actually originated with the title of my original journal. In the process of developing that first version of the site, I also wrote a number of software tools which allowed me to edit the journal online, through a web browser. This first version of the site went live in February 2000. I added a guestbook for people to leave comments in April of the same year. Almost immediately I realized that the code I had written could be expanded relatively easily to allow other people to share their own experiences from the road. So, I expanded the scope of the site to allow other people to contribute their own journals; this took longer than I thought (as always) and it eventually went live in March of 2001. The site grew organically, with me adding features here and there, and over the next few years crazyguyonabike became a fairly busy website, with hundreds of bicycle touring journals and articles.

Awards

Crazyguyonabike was winner of The Adventure Cycling Association's 2007 Pacesetter of the Year Award. More details in the newsletter, and theforum thread. Here's Neil's original Crazy Guy on a Bike journal, the one that started it all.
Adventure Cycling Awards

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