Weight Weenies

	Listings		Articles		Forum

About

Credits

Weight Reviewing Team

Forum Moderator Team

Florian Langner
Anders Milo		(retired)
Chris Motson		(retired)

Martin Appel
Frank Berkhout
Nik Hill
Florian Langner
Chris Pratley
Cory Starr		(retired)

Bike Gallery Editors

Nik Hill

Programming, Webdesign, Administration

Original Idea

Florian Langner

Chris Motson

A great big thanks goes out to the countless people who have submitted weights and to everyone who has emailed telling us how much they like the site and thanking us for doing a great job!

History

2000

Everything started in December 2000 when Nino Fenaroli posted an appeal in the forum of mtbr.com to send him accurate weights for a weight website. Over they years he had collected a list of nearly 800 weights from various resources like magazines, forums or off his own scale, which he carried to bike shops and bike shows. A few weeks later Chris Motson posted the same idea in the forum. Since Nino was limited in time and computer skills, Chris was the ideal partner and so they came together to build Weight Weenies. The site was hosted at a free webspace provider.

2001

Others contributed their weight collections and in spring 2001 Weight Weenies had grown to 1200 entries and a few weight related articles. The listings were manually maintained by Chris in Excel and exported to HTML. This wasn't very comfortable, so Chris decided to write dynamic ASP listings, which outputted the data from an Access database. In August 2001 Florian Langner, the webmaster of GypzyBikz, got in touch with Chris. As passionate cyclist Florian was impressed by the site, but he also noticed the poor connection speed and bad reliability of the webspace. That's why he offered Chris to host Weight Weenies for free. Chris was also very unsatisfied with the webspace and he agreed after a short consultation with Nino. After the migration was successfully finished on the 3rd September, Florian casually offered Chris to help him if he has any problem with ASP scripting. Chris was glad about a helping hand because he had just started studying chemistry at University and so Florian joined. A column for claimed manufacturer weights and the ability to sort the listings was introduced.

2002

In the course of time Chris was more and more occupied with his studies, so Florian intensed his work on Weight Weenies. The design of the listings was optimized and for easier maintenance a general code clean-up was done. Florian added the eagerly awaited ability to submit weights thru an easy form and coded a web interface, which offered for the first time a fast and comfortable way to maintain the listings as well as many other nifty features. In July a phpBB based forum was installed and during August Weight Weenies broke the barrier of 2000 listed weights.

2003

In February the look and feel of Weight Weenies was dramatically improved - the new Aqua-like look received much positive feedback. Anders Milo joined as reviewer for the submitted weights. The increased amount of features and visitors slowed down the ASP scripts, so the whole site was migrated to PHP, which gave a remarkable performance boost. Over the years we had collected the URLs of many manufacturer homepages, that's why a general link database was introduced. GypzyBikz decided for reliability reasons to change their hosting environment from Windows to Linux and so Weight Weenies had to move, too. The database backend was migrated to mySQL which resulted in another speed-up. And as always more articles and even more weights - the number of listed weights nearly doubled within a year.

to be continued...