The Westgate coffee shop, regular meeting place of the bikegeeks and the source of our main project's name has closed its doors as of 10:00am this morning, July 2nd.

The bikegeeks will, until further notice, meet at Cafe Ciao, diagonally across the street from Westgate's former location.

Here's what was posted on the Westgate website: (this link might not work for long)

After much work, the bikegeeks are proud to announce the launch of a new website for the Chicago Critical Mass ride at:

http://chicagocriticalmass.org/

The new site carries on in the tradition of the old Chicago Critical Mass site (archived here) while offering several updates. Most importantly, the new site tries to include the CCM community by allowing authenticated users (those with a Westgate login -- available to everyone) to contribute content. Users are encouraged to upload ride reviews on rides they've participated in to the site. These ride reviews (including links to external media sites) allows the community to write their own histories without the need for a "webmaster" gatekeeper. Additionally, users can upload flyers that were passed out at the ride or that are simply made available for download to promote Critical Mass in Chicago and around the world.

Additional functionality is planned for the new CCM site. Contact the bikegeeks if you have the inclination to help make it better.

Today a new site was launched for the UIC College of Cycling.

You can see the new site at http://bikeuic.org/

The UIC CoC group have been working with the bikegeeks for a few months to transition their old static-HTML site to Drupal/Westgate. The site will facilitate organizing efforts of this group to encourage cycling among UIC students, faculty, and staff.

The site autoshowshutdown.org, recently launched by the bikegeeks, was up only a few days before receiving a Cease and Desist email from the Chicago Auto Show's attorney. The bikegeeks contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for legal advice. The EFF took on the Auto Show Shutdown Association's (ASSA) case and responded to the C&D with a scathing letter.

Read more about it in the ASSA's press release.

The bikegeeks would like recognize the launch of AutoShowShutdown.org. This site, a parody of The Chicago Car Show website, serves as an organizing site for the annual Car Show SHUTDOWN Festival while poking fun at the car show industry.

After running in the development environment for over a week, the production Westgate system was upgraded to the latest version of the Drupal 4.7 branch -- 4.7.5.

This will be the last non-bugfix version of Drupal 4.7 now that Drupal 5.0 has been released. The bikegeeks are investigating the migration to 5.0.

The bikegeeks site has finally made it to production. This site was started along with the Westgate project itself, but never received any love until now.

Browse the site, and feel free to send us any feedback you might have.

thanks!
- the bikegeeks

The new Chicago Stolen Bike Registry site has now been launched in Westgate.

The Stolen Bike Registry makes use of the gmap module to do the nifty display of data points on Google Maps.

The site for Working Bikes Co-op has gone live in the Westgate system. Working Bikes now has snazzy (theme by jordanb), easy to use home on the net.

We have migrated the westgate project to Drupal version 4.7.2 (we were on 4.6.6). The new 4.7 version provides several new features and enhancements, but the one we're most excited about is the streamlined content creation capabilities; creating static site content is now much easier.

The rollout went smoothly. Everthing has been made to work in our development environment first. After everything was checked into subversion, the deployment on the production site was just a few commands.