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Got big plans for the weekend? Of course you don’t, you’re stuck inside like the rest of us. But, we can help with that and ease your motorcycle cravings at the same time.

On Saturday, April 25th at 11am PST / 8pm CEST, Asphalt & Rubber will be sitting down with MV Agusta CEO Timur Sardarov for a live chat on YouTube, and you can join us.

I have some questions of my own for Timur, but we want to make the show interactive, so we will be taking questions from the audience as well.

In the mainstream news, there is a lot of talk right now about net neutrality for internet service providers (ISPs), not to mention the whirlwind discussions about malicious electronic intrusions, like the Russian involvement in the 2016 US Presidential election, or the recent bout of ransomware that is being linked to North Korea.

The takeaway from these current events is that as our lives become increasingly dependent upon our online presence, we need to take our online security and privacy more seriously, especially during uncertain times.

Asphalt & Rubber might be only a modest motorcycle website, where you spend a handful of minutes during your day reading about all things two-wheeled, but we take these issues very seriously…and for good reason.

As such, we have enabled and forced HTTPS browsing for all users on our site, not only so your connection to our website is secure, but also so your privacy is protected from anyone who might wish to read or track your presence across the internet.

While we all wait to hear from Losail, as to whether the Qatar GP will go ahead as scheduled, or if MotoGP’s season-opener will get moved/cancelled on account of rain, it seems timely to remind Asphalt & Rubber readers how they can avoid race spoilers, now that the MotoGP and World Superbike seasons are upon us.

Of course, I am talking about becoming an A&R Pro member, which not only removes spoilers from the front pages of the site, but also does away with pesky banner ads, and includes exclusive content (not to mention it supports the what we do here, and decreases our dependence on advertiser dollars).

We are proud here at Asphalt & Rubber of our excellent racing coverage, and we are also proud to be the only motorcycle website that can offer its readers the ability to hide race content that might have result spoilers.

If you re a die-hard racing fan, what are you waiting for? Sign-up for A&R Pro before the MotoGP racing season officially gets underway.

For a long time, I have been unhappy with how we do motorcycle reviews here at Asphalt & Rubber – and if I am being real honest, I have been unhappy with how the industry as a whole deals with motorcycle reviews, especially in this new crazy online world.

Mea culpa, A&R is just as guilty as the rest when it comes to publishing motorcycle reviews. We have been just as lazy as the next publication, as we try to chase elusive pageviews at the end of each bike launch, with timely but flaccid prose (with varying degrees of success, on both accounts, I should say).

Well, I want that to stop. It is dumb, and it is bad for the ecosystem.

So, starting today we are going to try a new motorcycle review format – one that I have been chewing on for several months now. It is a three-pronged approach to bike reviews, which sees us trying to achieve different goals with each of our three postings about the new motorcycles we ride. Let me break them down for you.

We are launching something very special today, which is geared towards our most diehard readers. We call it A&R Pro. It is a premium membership that offers more features to the Asphalt & Rubber website, and more of the A&R content that you have grown to love.

For some of our readers, Asphalt & Rubber is maybe one of several websites you stop to read during the day, and it helps feed your two-wheeled addiction during the work week.

For others, your relationship with Asphalt & Rubber is more infrequent, stopping by A&R maybe whenever an interesting article shows up in your news feed or social media accounts.

That is great, and we are stoked to have you here. Your experience of Asphalt & Rubber isn’t going to change very much going forward, as we are deeply committed to providing free access to timely news, smart analysis, and unbiased reviews to all of our readers.

But, for the Asphalt & Rubber readers who can’t get enough of A&R – often coming here multiple times per day to get the latest stories – we wanted to offer you more of the content and community that you thrive on; and in the same breath, give you a way to help support Asphalt & RubberThat’s where A&R Pro comes in.

If you were on Asphalt & Rubber this weekend, you probably noticed that I switched the commenting system from WordPress’ basic system to Disqus’ more advanced commenting engine.

All previous comments should be imported now, and I hope there are relatively few bugs to reports. Hopefully this will mean a more engaged commenting section, since Disqus handles threaded comments more properly, and has already a good community following.

The slight downside is that some of our loyal commenters will have to register with the Disqus service, though that shouldn’t be too much of an issue since it is a very reputable one, and they won’t spam you once you register.

Another year has gone by at our tiny motorcycle blog here, as Asphalt & Rubber turns five years old today. The thing is though, the site isn’t that tiny anymore — one million visitors will come to A&R in October alone.

In the past four years, when I have written these birthday posts, I write the same thing about how I look back on the past 365 days with a bit of astonishment, and then list all the great things that we have done in that time.

At the five-year mark though, I find myself looking all the way back to the beginning of A&R, a time when this site wasn’t really anything at all. With that retrospect, I see how Asphalt & Rubber has come into what it is now — if I had to go back, and try to decipher today from the fog of time, it would all feel like an impossible reality, if I am honest.

Today is a surreal landmark, as it marks our fourth year of publishing Asphalt & Rubber. If you cannot already tell, I am having a hard time believing that four years have gone by since I started this humble motorcycle blog (in the middle of corporate finance class, no less), but A&R continues to thrive despite my best dyslexic efforts.

It astonishes me that our “little” site is visited throughout the world on a daily basis, and that each month more people read A&R than all three of the major US motorcycle print magazines…combined.

Things keep on growing here, and I am deeply grateful now to be publishing the work of David Emmett on A&R, as he continues to be one of the most insightful writers in motorcycle racing, in both the print and online mediums.

This year, I am also very honored to have had regular written and photo contributions from Scott Jones, Daniel Lo, and Jules Cisek this year — their work has helped Asphalt & Rubber earn a reputation for stunning photography, and I hear compliments about their photography virtually every time I meet a loyal A&R reader in person.

You may have already noticed the Google+ “+1” buttons on the site, as lately we’ve been playing around with the social networking service here at Asphalt & Rubber. It took the internet search behemoth a while to roll out pages for sites like A&R, but we’ve finally gotten our Google+ page up, and had some time to populate it with articles and such.

An alternative to website’s like Facebook, Google+ most notably lets you share and connect with other users based on your social circles, e.g. you can select to share articles from A&R only with your motorcycling friends (sparring your non-motorcycle friends from your two-wheeled addiction). So, if Google+ is your social network of choice, be sure to follow us on there to get your daily motorcycle fix, and “+1” any articles you wish to share.

It’s the end of October, and there is a picture of me from a birthday track day, so that could mean only one thing: Asphalt & Rubber has aged another year. Now into our third year of this crazy online motorcycle blog experiment, I pleasantly get to reiterate some of the text from last year’s anniversary announcement, as A&R continues to grow beyond anything that this dyslexic kid, who routinely failed writing classes, could have imagined.

This year has been one marked with notable events, as Asphalt & Rubber has come to you live from a bevy of remote locations for our race and event coverage, such as Qatar, Australia, and the Isle of Man. Storming perhaps the last refuge for motorcycle print journalism, we’ve also become one of only two pure-online publications regularly seen in the MotoGP paddock.

But most impressively this year, Asphalt & Rubber passed the 500,000 reader mark, and fittingly this October is shaping up to be our best month ever in terms of traffic & readership…as was the month before that, and the month before that — with all of that math culminating into the fact that A&R has almost doubled in size since last year’s birthday announcement.