1. Bikelane Map - yeah! a map of Toronto’s bikelanes!

2. Meet a fellow Cyclist and Her I Bike T.O. Shirt

3. Should the Toronto Cyclists Union change their name to Cycle Toronto?

4. How To - how to do stuff regarding your bike!

5. Winter Rider Profiles

6. 2012 Changes for BikingToronto

7. Sweet Ride 2012: Cupcake Edition!

8. Maps - sweet sweet geography

9. 2012 Sweet Ride and Cupcake Ride Schedule 

10. Photos from the Sunday Sweet Ride: Cupcake Edition

As well, here are the top 10 popular posts overall (or, at least since August 2010).

• Left-Wing Pinko I Bike T.O. Shirt

• Bikelane Map

• 10 Secrets to Cycling with Traffic: Part 1 of 10

• The Jack Layton I Bike T.O. Shirt

• 10 Secrets to Cycling with Traffic: Part 3 of 10

• 10 Secrets to Cycling with Traffic: Part 9 of 10

• 10 Secrets to Cycling with Traffic: Part 4 of 10

• BikeShop Map

• Rob Ford releases “Transportation Plan”

• Maps

I started making some changes to BikingToronto yesterday.  These are changes I’ve been thinking about for a while.

You’ll notice the following design changes:

1. New title logo. Big. Bright. Simple. Sassy.

2. Less clutter. I cleaned stuff up… something I try to do once a year at least. I try to refocus on what is working/popular on the site and take away stuff that isn’t working or were just nice experiments at the time.

3. More emphasis on “The Feed“, which is BikingToronto’s collection of News and Events, from mostly Toronto, but other cities as well sometimes. These are links I often don’t have time to blog about, but share on the Facebook page and Twitter (@bikingtoronto), and wanted a way to share them on both the main page of BikingToronto as well as on “post pages”.  You’ll see it down the right side of the site.  There’s a link from /film in there now, because I was testing something.

There is also a big change in the features of the site:

4. I’ve taken away the “social” features of the site (ie. member pages, discussion forums, etc). They were not really being used and were an administrative nightmare, not even including the gigantic amount of spam member sign-ups. I thought about this change for a while, but finally felt good about de-activating these features as cycling discussion in Toronto is for the most part taking place on larger social networks. Facebook and Twitter are excellent places for like-minded people to come together, and this includes the bike community.

What all this means for BikingToronto:

Essentially, I’m re-focusing on what the main goal of BikingToronto was from the very beginning (way back in 2006)… namely to make it easy for someone interested in biking in Toronto to find information quickly and easily. Back in 2006 there were some mailing lists and some websites, but I started to try and compile and link to everything so people would not have to search for stuff like I had.

Going forward, BikingToronto will stick to that goal… of making information and news accessible from many sources and via many methods.

The only way to change the world is to work together, not against one another.

Happy biking,

Joe.

[Photo by 'Xander Labayen of 416CycleStyle]

I’m going to start a new feature here on BikingToronto… something I’m going to call “The News Cycle”.

There is always so much happening in Toronto related to bikes that I sometimes don’t get a chance to blog about it (you can usually find everything on the BikingToronto Facebook Page or Twitter Feed though), and that isn’t fair to you, dear reader.

Therefore, I’m going to attempt to do a periodic post that links to and shortly describes things you need to see regarding bikes in Toronto.  At times, this may be a daily post, when there’s a lot of bike stuff going on (spring, summer and fall) or less-than-daily in the winter (although more and more bike stuff is happening in the winter now).

Stay tuned, and I hope you like it.

Be sure and subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook to get the latest!

Wow.  Last week we passed 7,000 followers over on Twitter.

Our followers include tons of Toronto people, as well as bike-related accounts from all over the “Twitter-verse”… which allows BikingToronto to not only keep them updated on the stuff happening in Toronto, but also helps keep us informed on what’s going on.

Looking back, our Twitter account passed 4,000 followers back in the first week of September last year, so we’ve added 3,000 followers in just the past year!  That’s like 8 people every single day!  Woo! Hoo!

It’s exciting, no?

Anyhow, go check out our Twitter account if you’re not already following us.  We tweet (and re-tweet) out a lot of links there that often don’t make it to the blog (because they’re either about other cities, or only tangentially related to cycling), so it’s a great resource to follow.

(If you prefer Facebook over / in addition to Twitter, you can “Like” our facebook page too).

A few weeks ago we had a BikingToronto Social at the Madison, and we’re planning a “Biking Toronto Ice Cream Social” for mid-July… and last week a few of us got together for a few hours around a firepit at Dufferin Grove Park and chatted, ate chips and roasted marshmallows.

I’m sharing a few photos from the evening because it was fun, and pictures are pretty.

The firepit crew was Todd (of the Long Ride East), Sage (of Quirky Nomads), Daegan (of Todd & Sage), Annie, Georgette (of Georgie_Grrl on Flickr), Derek, Andre, Hyedie (of the Toronto Girls Cupcake Ride), Kathryn, Duncan (of Duncan’s City Ride) and myself.

Almost all of these photos are by Georgette on Flickr (the 1st and 3rd are by me).  You should check out her photos.

Getting Ready

Annie "the Fire Queen" - she took a fire certification course to book the firepit, and Georgette made her a funny little crown in recognition.

Derek and Annie coax the Fire Gods to come out and play

The wet ground was not co-operating. We let Derek work his magic...

Derek loves marshmallows

The one pic of Hyedie without marshmallows on her stick.

We’ll let you know when we finalize plans for the Ice Cream Social… it’ll probably involve bike riding and ice cream!

The Madison's Patio

If you follow BikingToronto on Facebook or Twitter – you already know about this… but in case you don’t…

Tonight is the first “Biking Toronto Social” – an informal gathering of people who like to bike Toronto for food and drinks and good conversation.

It doesn’t have an agenda, a mandate, a mission statement, or anything like that.  Just a get-together to get to know fellow cyclists.

We’ll be trying to stake out a place on the cool patio at the Madison around 7pm.  Come on by… either ask for a reservation for “BikingToronto” or just look for a group of people with some bike helmets.

Time:    Monday, June 6 · 7:00pm
Location:    Madison Ave. Pub – 14 Madison Ave, near Bloor & Spadina (Map)

If you haven’t liked us on Facebook yet, you should.  It’s a great way to get links about news and the other fun stuff on this site, and we post bike-related stuff that is happening all around the world.  But, don’t worry… we only post the good stuff.  BikingToronto is all about the good stuff.

The following people who you may have heard of are among the people who already like BikingToronto.

• Matt Blackett (Spacing)
• Tammy Thorne (Dandyhorse)
• Jonathan Goldsbie (Spacing and National Post)
• Jason Paris (UrbanToronto)
• Donald Weidman (Bikes+Transit)
• Nancy Smith Lea (TCAT)
• Adam Vaughan (City Councillor – Ward 20)
• Joe Mihevc (City Councillor – Ward 21)
• Paula Fletcher (City Councillor – Ward 30)
• Jamie Kirkpatrick (Toronto Environmental Alliance)
• Adrian Heaps (City Councillor – Ward 35)
• Olivia Chow (MP – Trinity Spadina)
• Sandra Bussin (City Councillor – Ward 32)
• Ken Hunt (Torontoist)
• Dave Meslin (City-Builder Extraordinaire)
• Josh Colle (New City Councillor – Ward 15)
• Dufflet Rosenberg (Dufflet)
• Hyedie Hashimoto (Toronto Girls Cupcake Ride)
• Geoffrey Bercarich (Bike Pirates)
• Meg Orlinski (Deadly Nightshades)
• Angela Bischoff (Clean Air Alliance)
• Evalyn Parry (SPIN)
• Laurie McGregor (Two Wheels Green Delivery)
• Justin Lafontaine (BikeTrain)

All the shirts have been ordered, and are starting to be delivered to the winners.   @Lola_318 did us a favour and snapped a photo of her wearing her shirt.   Looks great!

We are always looking for photos of people wearing their I Bike T.O. shirts – so let us know if you have one.

Determined purely by page views, we give you the Top 25 Most Popular pages from March 2011.

1. Yonge Street to be Pedestrian and Bike-Friendly?
2. BikeMonth is ALIVE and WELL for 2011!
3. Twitter 5000 Contest
4. Bikelane Map
5. How Do You Solve A Problem Like BikeMonth?
6. Toronto Mobile Bike Map App Updated
7. Bixi Toronto Launches on May 3rd
8. Events
9. The Bixi Toronto Press Release – Full Text
10. Toronto’s Cycling Apps
11. BikeShop Map
12. Maps
13. How To
14. The Bike Union expands their Member Benefits
15. 10 Secrets to Cycling with Traffic: Part 1 of 10
16. Rachel McAdams: Another Celebrity Who Loves Biking Toronto
17. Are Separated Bikelanes coming to the Annex?
18. 10 Secrets to Cycling with Traffic: Part 9 of 10
19. Win an I Bike T.O. T-Shirt!
20. 10 Secrets to Cycling with Traffic: Part 4 of 10
21. Critical Mass Toronto
22. Weekly Wrap Up: Jarvis Bikelanes and Cycling Secrets
23. Left-Wing Pinko I Bike T.O. Shirt
24. 10 Secrets to Cycling with Traffic: Part 7 of 10
25. Wards

We thought we’d give everyone a heads-up about this today, as today is the last day of this contest.

We’ve been running this contest a little differently… we’re using a system called “Pay with a Tweet” to engineer it so that all you have to do to get to the t-shirt contest entry form is to tweet about the contest.

(don’t worry if you’re not on twitter – people on facebook can also share the contest on their facebook profile – you’ll see the option when you click the Pay with a Tweet button below)

To enter the contest and submit your name for a t-shirt, click this button:

If you haven’t seen our amazing I Bike T.O. shirts (where have you been?) using the logo we designed way back in 2006, here are just a few options of what you can pick out as your shirt (if you win).