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Five years of Roger Kramer's Favorite Cycling Tours

This week is the fifth anniversary of Roger Kramer's Favorite Cycling Tours being online. It's hard to believe that it's been that long since I created this site.

Here's a little history about the site. During the winter of 2001, I took a class in HTML at Southwestern Illinois College's Granite City campus. I figured I wouldn't hurt for someone in my field -- a newspaper page designer -- to learn a little bit of HTML as more and more people turn to the Internet to get their news.

For the final project, I decided to do a cycling Web site. I had been meaning to find some way to document my cycling adventures ever since a conversation I had with longtime friend Mary Ann Ebner. She asked whether I did a journal of my trips, and my answer was no. Once I took the class, I put two-and-two together and determined a Web site would be the best way to share accounts and photographs of the rides I've done in the United States and Canada.

After I completed the project and got an A in the class, I decided to put it online. It was raw, but it was a Web site. I've deleted the original version of the site, so I can't show you how raw it was.

Also that semester, I took a course in Dreamweaver. That taught me easier ways to further develop the plans I had for the site, and the site that exists now is the product of that. To see the site as it appeared in June 2001 after that Dreamweaver class, visit the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

As the final project for the Dreamweaver class, I did a Web site for the Tour de Stooges. You can see the results of that class here. You can see the Tour de Stooges site has come a long way since those beginnings.

Later that summer, I developed the Web site for the Belleville Area Bicycling and Eating Society. At the time, members had a difficult time getting up-to-date information about the rides, and I decided that the way to solve that problem was to develop the site. You can see an early version of the BABES site here.

I started the blog portion of the site in February 2004 as a way to provide commentary on various issues both inside and outside cycling. Regular readers of the blog have seen that this page has more or less become a clearninghouse on cycling news. Thanks to Feed Burner, I've been able to add feeds to various cycling sites to this page, and I think that feature makes this page more useful to regular readers of my blog -- especially when during those lulls when I don't post anything original here.

I want to thank all of you regular readers of this site for making in a success beyond my wildest dreams. I'm looking forward to serving the cycling community in the same way for years to come.

Roger 0 comments 10:56 AM