Back in 2008, not long after I started mountain biking, The MMBA was looking for a volunteer to help fix its poorly performing website. While fairly new to the mountain biking community I had a good deal of experience with providing reliable small-scale web hosting; lessons learned from running my personal site, nuxx.net and a few other virtual hosts for friends. Through my friends Nick and Marty Shue, whom I had casually known since back in the BBS days, I began leading volunteer work on the site, resolving the main performance issue, migrating it to my server, and eventually expanding its capabilities.
It was the perfect combination of my interests: computers, mountain biking, and providing a useful service to other online users.
With help from numerous people, including Rob Ritzenhein doing Joomla work for the original main site, Nick and Marty working through the migration planning (the photo to the right was taken during the site migration itself) and handling some forum moderation, the transition went smoothly and it’s been stalwart ever since. I was even fortunate enough to work with Jeff Lau who wrote an incredibly impressive Trail Guide whose simplicity and usefulness has no current parallel. Many other volunteers contributed to the content; writing posts, submitting trail guide updates, and generally tweaking content.
While the MMBA has gone through some radical changes, working to redefine itself as the chapters moved into the IMBA Chapter Program, the MMBA website site, particularly the forum and Trail Guide, has remained the top source for information on mountain biking across Michigan.
Through this time I gained tremendous experience learning how to assure reliability of production systems, the political parts of working with others, guiding volunteers as they work on projects they are passionate about, and wrangling problem users in online communities among other things. I also met countless wonderful people, made some great friends, and even managed to make a few people hate me.
After seven years I’ve decided that it’s time for me to move on. Over the next few months I will be working with the MMBA Board of Directors and Byte Productions, LLC of Traverse City to smoothly migrate the site (including the forum) to a new home. Once complete my server will be back to hosting my personal sites and a few small pages for friends, stuff that I consider much less critical. Then I’ll have time to figure out what to do next.
Steve, very sad to hear this. Thank you for your rock steady work. Good luck in all your future endeavors, Scott.