Spread the word about Trikepilot.com Social Edition!

First of all, thanks to all my fellow triker pals who have taken the time this week to log in and upload your goodies. I think we are off to a good start already.



Several of you have been asking me about how to accomplish certain things in this site, and we've been working together to learn and try new features.






My favorites thusfar are as follows:





1) Tony Castillo gets the A++ for his terrific bio and Wonderful images Tony. Most of all, however, you reminded all of us that we are "sorely" in need of some female eye-candy in this sport. Can you PUHLEAAASE load some more images from that promotional photo shoot? ;) I think I speak for the group here...








2) Miklos Zsolnay for your sheer volume of cool vids and stories and photos. Your contributions are greatly appreciated;







3) John Keith figured out how to do that HTML linking in his blog so that he could put up his own link favorites, and references to his own sites. Nice job on that John, I like the way you worked it through;





4) Rob Caya, thanks for picking up the slack on the news of our wonderful aventure down to Shawnee and beyond. I can't wait to hear your updates on the training adventures in the new 912, and see how quickly we can be up there working on our formation flying!!



5) John Cortesy, thanks for your "what I learned about flying" blog entry and your posting of your videos from Alex Gore's "Winds and Wings" site. I've tried to contact Alex several times to get him on board, but perhaps he's at Oshkosh? I love those vids and would welcome them here direct from the source. Your trike colors are also very cool ;)




As I'm thinking about what to include, I think it best to throw open the door to everyone and ask for your input on what things you are trying to figure out in the site, what you like so far, and what we should add or change?

On a personal note, I'm working on some of the layout issues, the advertising space (such as whether I should include Ebay auctions relating to Aviation gear like GPS's???), and the photo displays.



Did you know that you can upload your images for free to Flickr with the bulk uploader (easier than doing it one at a time) and then keep those files private at Flickr, but "slurp" the ones that you want over to this site automatically? It's true! The advantage is that you can bulk upload as many as 100MB of photos to Flickr very very fast, then use that as a launching pad for sharing your photos here or elsewhere without having to email or compress or anything (since Flickr supports multiple sizing automatically). There is an option in your photo upload menu here that asks if you want to integrate your photos from Flickr. The initial setup is a tiny bit of work, but once it is done, the rest is sooo much faster and easier. Check it out here:



Did you also know that you can embed widgets or videos from other sites into your page with one click? This means that you can take any favorite video or embed code or widget and "paste" it into either your video section, photo section, or your special "text box" at the top of your personal page (like for a weather widget or similar).



Likewise, in the lower left corner of your page you have an RSS feeder. This means you can automatically display any RSS data from any other website page or feed, this includes advertising, photos, videos, blogs, whatever.... very very handy and you can get creative here by putting your own advertising feed into your page if you want to try to generate a bit of revenue yourself.



Lastly, did you know that any photos or videos you post at this site will ALWAYS be watermarked and link back to your page no matter who "shares" them? This is different than YouTube or metacafe, where your videos or photos are forever "lost" when shared, because the links only go back to the main sites of YouTube or metacafe, not your own source site.





Find more photos like this on Trikepilot - Social Edition




To conclude this post, I'm asking all of you to take advantage of the viral tools on this site, including the badge widget at the bottom right of every page. With this you can send a "postcard" so to speak to all your triking fans or friends. They too can then join on automatically. This or sending an invite on the email function (at the top left) will let us get the word out quickly and get as many people to join as possible.





The original Trikepilot.com site has more than 6000 unique visitors every month from more than eighty countries around the world (I'm amazed when I check my Google Analytics every day at the remote locations that log on! ... Borneo?, Rangoon?, Tibet?) My personal goal is to get every one of those viewers to join on to this social site if possible, even if they only lurk. I'm thinking of opening up some form of tracking or contest to see who can get the most people to subscribe (a little multi-level marketing??).
What do you think?



Safe Flying!

Spence

Bivouac to Cushing Field and Oshkosh

Wow, what a week. After being virtually "grounded" for months, I managed to put on more than fifteen hours of flying in a period of four days!

The adventure began last Friday morning. I picked up my friend Rob Caya in Chicago and we drove east towards my flying farm in SW Michigan, about eighty miles away. Rob is working on obtaining his Sport Pilot's license, and is going to soon be a Quantum 912 owner. He is a natural-born pilot, so we've had a great time together putting on some dual hours in my Quik.

Thankfully traffic was light, so we arrived at the field before eleven and packed some light gear into the machine.

We called ahead to Tony Castillo, who was with John Keith and their mutual friend Greg. Tony and John are the USA representatives for P&M Aviation USA and also run their own great site at Trikeflyers. Tony, John and Greg had been flying up towards Cushing Field in Newark, IL, when I called, so I asked them to detour over to Shawnee Field in Bloomfield, IN instead. Shawnee is at 1I3 here

Rob and I took off into warm and clear skies, with just a few puffy clouds in either direction. Our course was due South, and we had tailwinds from the N/NE at upwards of 20mph. This gave us a hands-off ground speed of around 95 to 105 mph in the Quik. We started out flying at 2500 agl, but found that we were getting a tiny bit of chop from the temperature inversion layer. When we climbed up to 4500 the air smoothed out nicely, though we were a touch on the cold side for what we were wearing.


I handed the bar over to Rob so that he could get a little back-seat bar time, and he seem to enjoy the opportunity. In the meantime, I played around a bit with getting my iPhone (yes, I'm a gadget freak) to work pumping music into the Lynx intercom system.


We eventually made our way down to Shawnee Field (1I3) where we were met with the site of three gorgeous new P&M Quik microlights on the ground. A phone call to Allistair Wilson and fifteen minutes later we were eating lunch with the gang of flyers in Spencer, IN, about five minutes from the field.

Lunch was short and tasty, but we needed to get Rob back to the airport so he could check-out Allistair's Quantum 912 that was for sale. I left those two for a bit and took a ride into town for some gas. When I returned, Rob was in the circuit making touch-and-goes with Allistair. It looked as if the deal was sealed and Rob was going to be the proud owner of a new 912!



We gathered the gang together and made a brief plan for some formation flying on the way back to the Chicago area.
Time was short and we didn't get off the ground until after 5:30pm EST, which meant that we had very little room for error on the return if we were going to get on the ground before dark. To our dismay, the tailwinds we enjoyed on the way down were still there...only now they were tailwinds, and still clipping along at 25mph plus!

On the way back we did an airshow formation takeoff, with the requisite lap around the pattern for good luck. We then proceeded due north in a missing-man "V" with Tony brining up the rear for photographs and video. Our chosen altitude was 1500 agl, but then we dropped down on the deck for some terrain mapping action. Greg and John slipped back and Tony took the lead with me on his high 4 o'clock, in the "Flying Freedom" video angle setup. I was able to get some decent video and stills of him from various angles and directions while he grazed the tree-tops at 100mph plus.
The thing that was unusual to me is that I had done the same type of flying with Rob Rollison back in 2000 on the White River, but we were flying at 40 to 50 mph back then. Now, Tony and I were doing more than twice that speed, and not at Sunset, so the bumps were still there. It was quite a challenge to keep my shot aligned for Rob on video and me on stills while I trailed Tony making his maneuvers below.

The result of our work seems pretty nice, however, and I'll be featuring that media here shortly. Here's a quick preview:

Around Eight Thirty we had made it to within thirty miles of my home airport in Sawyer Michigan. We were still fighting the winds, however, and everyone needed gas. At that time we decided it prudent to drop in to fill our gas tanks, and drain our other tanks.

More to come...