Bike Up racks me up

I had a great experience with a company called Bike-Up Bicycle Parking Systems Inc. out of Nepean, Ontario, recently that I wanted to share. I had been searching for over a month for a 3-5 bicycle rack for work so we no longer had to double lock bikes or fight over the one hitching pin affixed to the building. Their standard 4-ring rack (at right) was a little big, so they custom made a 2-ring version. I didn't choose the powder coat as I wasn't sure what colour would fit the best where it was being installed, so we may add some colour later.

They were great at answering my questions, and the time from order to delivery may vary, but in my case, it was less than a week! What a great experience after "dealing" with another company who after two feedback attempts and a voicemail, did not have the courtesy to call back. I even had to go to the City of Kingston to find a local bike rack manufacturer. I asked my own city where they sourced theirs, and did not receive a reply.

HTML Editor

I've developed a handful of web sites (mine is woefully out of date) and I help maintain one at my job using Dreamweaver, but I wanted to give some free site editors a try. NVU looked to be a good contender, and as a WYSIWYG editor it's not bad - however, it has mangled enough pages to put me off from using it as my primary editor, especially with the CSS editor. I've tried a few text-based HTML editors, and one that rises to the top is HTML-KIT. It has many shortcuts for HTML code and even includes a rudimentary FTP and file client, so I can stay within HTML-KIT and do most functions. It's integrated with HTML Tidy so I can code without worrying about formatting, then clean it up for readability and standards compliance. I have a bit of work to fine tune the site, especially for more consistent CSS styles.

You can see my results at my friend's web site Trump Homes. I've put my Google skills to use and for a brief time it was the #1 search results on "trump homes" (without the quotes). With the quotes, it is #1 on Google and Yahoo search. Other search engines, such as AOL and AllTheWeb appear to use Google and Yahoo, respectively, so they're already covered. Google also has an interesting Dashboard in their Webmaster Tools which can be used to track how they are scanning the site and how effective the keywords and rankings are.