We're making the most of having Mike around today because he won't be with us next week. Sad faces. You may have heard us mention previously that Mike is taking part in a charity bike ride from north to south Wales, a total of 260 miles. That challenge starts on Monday.
Mike, along with a group of local businessmen, will be spending Monday to Thursday next week cycling from Holyhead to Cardiff. Between them they are hoping to raise £20,000 for charity and we're super chuffed to be able to say that they have already raised over £12,000!
The guys have been taking this challenge really seriously. As well as the financial investment of getting kitted up with the latest in buttock protection and anti chafe cream, they have been training unbelievably hard, racking up over almost 3500 training miles.
Whilst a week without Mike is sure to be one of peace and quiet, we will be keeping up with his progress on the website that Toward designed and built. When Mike decided to get involved in the ride, we immediately offered our design services to help create an identity and the website.
Whilst we could have just gone for a bog standard website that offered basic information, we thought it would be a great opportunity to challenge ourselves a little by creating a portal of live information and updates both before and during the ride.
Live twitter feed and mile tracker
Twitter Feed
The integration of the @whosebrightidea twitter account into the homepage of the site was pretty simple, but giving all the riders access to update the feed via their smart phones means that the homepage is virtually always updated with a new ride related tweet. This will really come into play on Monday when the ride kicks off and they're all frantically tweeting about the pain!
Mile Tracker and Countdown
The website uses WordPress as a content management system (CMS) and we created a custom area where Mike can really quickly and easily update the number of miles covered using the WordPress iPhone app. The timer which counts down the number of days until the ride ends updates automatically each day.
Whose Bright Idea Was This blog post by Mike
Blog
To help tell the story of the lead up to the ride, we added a fully functional blog to the site. This gave any of the riders the opportunity to write about their experience of training for the challenge. The support team are also planning to write each day of the ride to give a more in-depth update about the moans and groans from the riders!
Live donation tracker and live photo gallery feed
Donation Tracker
The donation facility was set up with Just Giving and using the API they made available, allowed us to stream a live feed of the current total. A great way to inspire the guys.
Live Gallery
The last live feed is a photo gallery from Flickr. We set up an account for the ride and used the Flickr API to feed images straight into the homepage. The guys all have the Flickr app on their iPhones so they can all contribute to the gallery during the four days.
So this is it. Weeks of training have ended. Now it happens. We wish the guys all the best and we send our many congratulations for the great big lump of cash already raised for some fantastic charities. Go Mike, go!
