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