🚨 Please note: BikePortland is currently on hiatus and only publishing guest articles. Learn more here. Thank you. - Jonathan 🙏

First look: new BTA website

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Here’s the first look at the BTA’s new website. They’ve been in dire need of an update and from what I’ve seen poking around the beta version, it was well worth the wait! The work was done by Grapheon, a local communications design firm.

The site should be live to the public “sometime next week”.

Of particular note is a nicely integrated blog, expanded employee bios, and a cool little weather checker on the bottom of each page (just roll over with your mouse, enter your zip code and voila…weather!).

They’ve really gone the extra mile to make this a site we can all be proud of. Big kudos to Grapheon for giving the BTA a legit web presence.

Add me to your Gmail web clips

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If you use Google’s popular email service, Gmail or their killer Desktop*, I just heard about a cool new feature called Web Clips that allows you to display headlines from your favorite websites (hint, wink) right above your inbox (see below) or in your sidebar.

(*update: I just downloaded Google Desktop (wow) and as a default it adds recently visited sites to your web clips.)

It’s really simple to add a new feed in Gmail. Here is more from the Google help pages.

And here’s a screenshot of my feed in action:
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“Unstolen” bike ready for release

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The Wise Old Bicycle Guy has been working on a unique way to combat our growing bike theft problem. His idea is to “unsteal” bikes by fixing them up from donated parts and giving them back to bike theft victims…for free.

He’s got a “bike-shop quality” mountain bike (he used to be a pro mechanic so it’s probably really nice) that he’s offering to anyone who qualifies. He’s going to email out the location and the combination to the lock and it goes to the first person to track it down.

So how do you qualify?

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