Sandy's Blog

Singletrackworld is a popular UK website with mountain biking related news, and very active forums. Unfortunately the site is packed with images, flash, javascript, inline styles and adverts, and the forums are full of interesting people. However it is a good source of information and it is quite good to find out what other people are doing, cheap stuff for sale etc.

The main discussion forum list page weighs in at around 80Kb HTML only. Then you have the 40 or so actual posts that stem off from this. The classifieds forum is about the same size.

Previously I wrote a greasemonkey script for Firefox that changes the site to be nicer on the eyes and hides most of the crappy adverts etc.

I decided to create an RSS feed of the forums at the weekend because I was so bored of waiting for the forums to load due to the page size, hidden adverts and site problems.

General Discussion RSS 2.0 Feed
Classifieds RSS 2.0 Feed

These feeds are about 150Kb each and have the entire threads (until the articles disappear from the front page of the forum).

I biked to work on Friday, and took some quite nice pictures.

This first picture is probably 500m after Castlelaw fort. Notice the shadows on Turnhouse Hill, and how Glencorse reservoir almost wants to freeze over but doesn’t.

This picture was taken a bit further up, looking the other way towards IKEA etc.

At the top now (Fala Knowe), looking towards western Edinburgh and you might be able to make out the rail bridge in the distance.

Heading downwards, great view of Edinburgh and Fife, singletrack further on to the right menacingly snaking its way around the hill, waiting for me.

For sure, living out on the sticks can suck. But there are days that just seem to compensate entirely for this - like the fact I have the Pentland Hills directly between House and Work.

Back on Wednesday, the ground was frozen, not muddy and very grippy so I decided to at least get some off roading in. Biked all the way up past Castlelaw to the top of the hills, and down the other side.

I decided to do a particularly sketchy trail, one of my most favorite bits in the Pentland Hills. Its basically less than 6″ wide slightly off-camber sheep track for a Km or two, then gets very pant-fillingly-steep before a 90 degree downhill corner where it starts to flatten out.

Bottled the corner by unclipping as I thought I was going to crash, but it was all good due to the cold weather giving me additional grip.

Now if I lived in Edinburgh doing this sort of thing before work just wouldn’t be possible.