website | Moto-Abruzzo

01/01/201827/04/2019

New year, new domain!

https://www.moto-abruzzo.net/

Well it looks like 2018 is bringing in changes thick and fast … Not only are we relocating, but moto-abruzzo has also moved! The site has changed to a new domain (see above! 😀 ) but more importantly, it has had an upgrade in security – we’re now https instead of good old http. That simply means that any interaction you now have with the site is encrypted and secure, especially important with the expansion plans that I hope to roll out over the coming year. Meanwhile I’ve a lot of website-tweaking to do as some bits didn’t seem to survive the move too well ….. more midnight oil to burn!

06/09/2015

5 years on ….

2010 ……. A year we made a mad-dash to the UK by Capo when an Icelandic volcano rather unsportingly blew its top. A year we gained a Kitten (Sam-Sam) and lost a cat – my venerable old friend Joe. A year when Kelly the English setter lost a foot but found a strange kind of companionship with a chicken! A year when the Capo went MoSFET and sported a nice new headlight switch ……. But most of all, it’s the year when the moto-abruzzo WordPress website/blog went live. 5 years to the day to be exact!

Way back then, Jan told me that something like an estimated 75% of blogs are abandoned after the first three months, so I’m glad to have dodged that particular statistic …… also that the ‘in’ joke website amongst the blogging glitterati is that most blogs have a readership of 1. Looks like I nailed that one then!

The reality is of course, that a site mainly dedicated to one particular bike is never going to have much traffic. In truth I suppose I have written it more as an aid-memoir for the Capo in the years to come, a diary of one particular bikes journey and it’s issues along the way.

The intention was always to keep it clear of advertising and not ask for funding to maintain it, other than that, it just goes where time and content takes it. Maybe when the Aprilia Caponord Rally-Raid ETV1000 Caponord (touch-wood!) hits 100,000 miles next year I’ll look at winding down the site and porting the content over to a self-publish book to put on the shelf, that way the content won’t disappear if the server/host decides to pull the plug one day.

Until then of course, the increasing miles on the Capo will generate a proportional increase in site content as a consequence of needing more restoration work. There’s also the question of a possible stable-mate ……. Do I plough on with the Capo regardless, or wind-down the mileage after 100k and look for something to take over the long-distance Euro trips. If so what? Inevitably I seem to go full circle and come back to square-one – another Capo, a Rally-Raid of course. I suppose it makes sense – reasonable price, ample spares to hand and a working knowledge of the model, and it does exactly what I want from a bike, period.

Either way, 2016 will be a landmark year with (I hope) plenty of posts and new pages.

11/10/201426/05/2016

etv1000.net

Aprilia Caponord ETV1000 Rally-Raid - ETV1000.NET I had one of those emails the other day, you know the sort – trying to sell you a domain name at a grossly over inflated price. I hovered over it just long enough to catch the domain name before launching it into the trash. But then the bells started ringing somewhere in the dusty recesses of my mind …… I know that domain, ETV1000.net – home of the French Caponord forum!

Well the long and the short of it is that the domain expired on 20th July and was in fact in the last 5 day window (Pending Delete) so would be released any time now. Rather than let it go to one of these places that hog expired domain names and use them as advertising sites, I took a chance and as luck would have it – bagged it yesterday!

So I’d love to hear from anyone that knows what happened to the site and more importantly, where are the French Capo owners meeting on the internet? If anyone in France wants to resurrect the site, then shout up through the contacts page, I’m sure something can be worked out.

Oh and thanks whoever you are … without the junk email I would never have known about this! 😉

04/05/201408/07/2018

Capopedia.net ……. the resurrection!

Well another wet’n windy Sunday is upon us yet again and I find myself scouring the small-ads for a boat, a bloody big boat capable of taking animals and motorbikes 2 by 2 …. Because if we have much more rain folks, I think we’ll be washed clean off the hill-side! A month now with hardly a dribble of sunshine …… 🙁

But in fairness it has given me chance to take stock and work out where I want to go Capo-on-the-internet wise. A couple of years ago I registered Capopedia.net and started a Wiki with the idea of using it as a repository for ETV1000 knowledge that could be refined and added to by the Capo owners themselves.

All well and good …… but I didn’t really get stuck into it, so others that signed up probably looked around and felt just as daunted by a blank bit of web space and didn’t come back! Now that’s my fault entirely and as the months rolled by I did nothing to address the issue.

So …… time to reflect. Is it a good idea anyway, or should I just hit the button and nuke the whole thing? It was close I don’t mind admitting. Cost, responsibility and a not least time & effort, versus content deletion, cancelling the domain name and saving a few bob. But what are the alternatives?

The internet hosts various Caponord forums of course, in many languages. But in English we’re pretty much used to one site only …. AF1. Forums are fantastic places for the exchange of ideas and information, the problem however is that the details get buried in a never-ending procession of new posts and threads, yes they can be ‘stickied’ but it’s not perfect. This can make access to the information difficult if not almost impossible at times, depending on how obscure the search is. Add to this the fact that periodically the host may purge the pages to save on storage space (archive them) loosing images and links they contain as they’re reduced to raw text and you can see that maybe they’re not ideal for information storage.

And so after some thought the Capopedia wiki is resurrected. The software has been updated, login and new user structure (hopefully) working and a bunch of extensions have been added to make the whole thing a better experience for admins and users. As of this week I’m going to make an effort to at least put aside an hour or two each day to chip away at it …. nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the …… well you get the drift.

So if anyone is interested in becoming a Sysop (administrator) to help run the thing, I’d be glad to hear from you ………. 🙂

12/03/2014

Feedback please ……

... will I dream? (SAL9000 - 2010) Moto-abruzzo has undergone quite a change in the background, somewhere deep in the bowels of the code lots of little ‘0’ and ‘1’s have been fiddled with …… and so I’d like to ask your assistance in flagging up any links, pages etc. that don’t work properly so I can fix them, or sob quietly in the corner (my choice!).

The idea is to hopefully get website content distributed to you a little quicker and so ANY feedback is greatly appreciated. Either leave a comment on the particular page/post or contact me through the contact page. Cheers!