Looking for someone to take over the forum!

[Albert]

Greetings, I hope everyone is doing well!

I am looking for someone to take over this website, and in particular, the forum (which, right now, is the entirety of the website, since the forum is parked on the root of the domain).  I am moving from Austin this month, after moving here initially in 1997.  It's been a long time, and I've seen Austin grow immensely during the nearly 30 years I've been here!  I've been looking for a change for a while, and we finally bought a house in another state in May, my better half has already been living there since July, and it's time for me to finally get the hell out of here (business kept me here a bit longer, and I'm wrapping that up and about to pack all of that up).

I've had an awesome time mountain biking (and sometimes, riding on roads) in Austin over the years, and it's been amazing watching the mountain biking scene here explode during that time.  As well as all the trails that have been built or expanded during my tenure here.  I've met tons of great people, had fun building trails, and overall had a fantastic time riding the wide variety of trail systems we have within an hour's radius of Austin.  Just recently I was given a tour of the (relatively) new Katy Trails and have had a lot of fun with those, and I know they will continue to be expanded over time.  Definitely get out there if you haven't already.  🙂

Running the forum is pretty straightforward, especially once it's moved to another server and is running (something I'm glad to help with). 

I will transfer the austinmountainbiking.com domain as part of this process, at no charge.  The site will need to be moved to another server, and it'll probably run fine on a VPS. Right now it's running on a dedicated server along with some other sites I host, but it's not a very resource intensive site, and it's also not huge.  If the server logs are pruned (which I've never done), the site will be under a GB in size, including the database, which is only 100MB zipped.  I am happy to help someone move the entire site and get it functional on another server, it just needs to be running PHP 8.x, along with MySQL (there will be specific PHP and Apache modules required as well, but that's generally not difficult to setup).  A site with access to cPanel would be ideal, as I could easily transfer the site over with very little work involved.

When I first set the site up (as an alternative to Bike MoJo at the time, which was being overrun with spam), I had planned to do a lot more with it, but my life just became super busy and I simply did not have time to dump into this site as I had originally planned.  Someone else could take the site and market a bit, such as promoting it on Facebook, Twitter, Threads, etc., to attract more users.  There's obviously a large biking community in Austin.  🙂

I have no plans on taking the site down immediately.  However, if nobody is ultimately interested, I will eventually take it down, as I am trying to simplify things in my life, and running and maintaining dedicated servers and the websites sitting on them is definitely on that list.

Please send me a PM here if you're interested, and we can talk.

Thank you!

 ..Al

[AustinBike]

And, if someone is interested in taking this over, I am going to be moving out of Texas early next year and AustinBike will close up shop unless there is a local person interested in maintaining that site as well. The site runs on Joomla 4 which is going EOL so I could transfer domain and give you a full backup, but eventually it would need to move to Joomla 5.

[Albert]

4 hours ago, AustinBike said:

And, if someone is interested in taking this over, I am going to be moving out of Texas early next year

No shit!!!

[Ridenfool]

Thank you both for all you've done over the years. It is appreciated. Best wishes going forward.

Hope someone steps up. Maybe combine the two domains onto a single host.

[Albert]

37 minutes ago, Ridenfool said:

Hope someone steps up. Maybe combine the two domains onto a single host.

Yeah, that would be interesting, the forum could just be another facet of a site that has all that information about Austin (and not-so-Austin) trails.  I don't know how much John has been keeping his site up to date, probably would need some updates with trails that have opened, changed, and closed in recent times.

[TheX]

47 minutes ago, Ridenfool said:

Thank you both for all you've done over the years. It is appreciated. Best wishes going forward.

Agreed

[TAF]

We're all leaving! Time to post the Okerholm video on TikTok!

[TheX]

Riding again likes free stuff.

[TheX]

In all seriousness, I know a lot of people have used and appreciated both sites. I hope you all enjoy your new ventures. 

[Sluggo]

On 11/2/2024 at 8:33 PM, Albert said:

Greetings, I hope everyone is doing well!

I am looking for someone to take over this website, and in particular, the forum (which, right now, is the entirety of the website, since the forum is parked on the root of the domain).  I am moving from Austin this month, after moving here initially in 1997.  It's been a long time, and I've seen Austin grow immensely during the nearly 30 years I've been here!  I've been looking for a change for a while, and we finally bought a house in another state in May, my better half has already been living there since July, and it's time for me to finally get the hell out of here (business kept me here a bit longer, and I'm wrapping that up and about to pack all of that up).

I've had an awesome time mountain biking (and sometimes, riding on roads) in Austin over the years, and it's been amazing watching the mountain biking scene here explode during that time.  As well as all the trails that have been built or expanded during my tenure here.  I've met tons of great people, had fun building trails, and overall had a fantastic time riding the wide variety of trail systems we have within an hour's radius of Austin.  Just recently I was given a tour of the (relatively) new Katy Trails and have had a lot of fun with those, and I know they will continue to be expanded over time.  Definitely get out there if you haven't already.  🙂

Running the forum is pretty straightforward, especially once it's moved to another server and is running (something I'm glad to help with). 

I will transfer the austinmountainbiking.com domain as part of this process, at no charge.  The site will need to be moved to another server, and it'll probably run fine on a VPS. Right now it's running on a dedicated server along with some other sites I host, but it's not a very resource intensive site, and it's also not huge.  If the server logs are pruned (which I've never done), the site will be under a GB in size, including the database, which is only 100MB zipped.  I am happy to help someone move the entire site and get it functional on another server, it just needs to be running PHP 8.x, along with MySQL (there will be specific PHP and Apache modules required as well, but that's generally not difficult to setup).  A site with access to cPanel would be ideal, as I could easily transfer the site over with very little work involved.

When I first set the site up (as an alternative to Bike MoJo at the time, which was being overrun with spam), I had planned to do a lot more with it, but my life just became super busy and I simply did not have time to dump into this site as I had originally planned.  Someone else could take the site and market a bit, such as promoting it on Facebook, Twitter, Threads, etc., to attract more users.  There's obviously a large biking community in Austin.  🙂

I have no plans on taking the site down immediately.  However, if nobody is ultimately interested, I will eventually take it down, as I am trying to simplify things in my life, and running and maintaining dedicated servers and the websites sitting on them is definitely on that list.

Please send me a PM here if you're interested, and we can talk.

Thank you!

 ..Al

Thanks for carrying it along after Mojo. Good luck to you!

[TheX]

I'm an IT director and know a bit about these things. If someone wants to run this and needs a hand I can probably help.

[ATXZJ]

Good luck and congrats on the move. It's amazing how much our quality of life has improved since we got out of Austin. 

[tomreece]

I'm a software engineer interested in helping keep this site running! I used to be very active on it a couple years ago but slowed down riding a bit so I have been absent lately. But I'm not out of the game entirely.