Latest Posts:
Asphalt & Rubber
Tag

site

Browsing
Announcement

Welcome to A&R 2.0

By No Comments

If you are reading this, it should be fairly obvious that Asphalt & Rubber has undergone a bit of an upgrade.

This redesign has been a long time coming, but we finally gave the old girl a sprucing up, just in time for her 10th birthday, which will be in October this year.

I won’t bore you with the technical and editorial advantages that A&R 2.0 brings us, though there are many, but from a reader’s standpoint there are a few things we want to highlight:

  • Loads faster
  • More stories on the front page
  • Better category browsing
  • Mobile and tablet friendly
  • Photo galleries actually work (check it out at the end of this post)
  • New storytelling formats
  • Rich media friendly (videos, podcasts, etc)
  • Way more cowbell

The full transition to the new layout and site will take a few more days to complete, so pardon our dust while we work. The basics should all be ready for you at this point though: reading stories, navigating categories, and commenting.

Our A&R Pro readers have been taking the new site for a spin this last month, and we have gotten a great deal of feedback from them and are already making those changes to the site.

Now that it is live for everyone, feel free to kick the tires on the new design and leave us your thoughts on the layout.

We know things like the A&R Pro pages, contact forms, and sidebar need some work. Those should be ready by the end of the Labor Day weekend, if not sooner. 

A quick shout out to a few people who were instrumental at the various stages of this process, I doubt we would have gotten here without their hard work: Ivan Lo, Dustin Gibbs, Louda Peña, and Dan Lloyd. Many thanks to them for dealing with my reptile brain.

And as always, thank you dear readers for coming to Asphalt & Rubber every day. You all make the hard work worthwhile. Let’s all head to the comments section and sing kumbaya.

-JB

Keep Reading
By
Reviews

We’re Going to Try a New Motorcycle Review Format

By 80 Comments

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.

Keep Reading
By
News

Asphalt & Rubber Turns Five Years Old Today

By 52 Comments

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.

Keep Reading
By
News

Asphalt & Rubber Turns Four Years Old Today

By 54 Comments

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.

Keep Reading
By
News

Asphalt & Rubber Turns Three Years Old Today

By 41 Comments

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.

Keep Reading
By
News

Asphalt & Rubber Turns Two Years Old Today

By 22 Comments

And now for the most important news story of the year: Asphalt & Rubber turns two-years-old today (clap you crazy bastards!). Officially now in our “terrible twos”, A&R continues to grow beyond anything I possibly could have imagined when I first started the site one cold October morning in a frost-covered Pennsylvania. Reporting everything from race results to business analysis, from industry news to humorous distractions, we’ve served over 1,800 articles to our now 300,000+ loyal monthly readers.

While I write occasionally, Asphalt & Rubber really wouldn’t be possible without the help from a metric ton of people, most notably Daniel Lloyd (systems administrator / reluctant coder), Dustin Gibbs (web developer / photographer / escape driver), Peter Lombardi (photographer / designer), Jason Yu (photographer / umbrella girl finder), Scott Jones (photographer / resident person over 50), and Tim Hoefer (hetero life-partner / tamed motorcycle rider). Also a big thanks goes out to all our friends (you know who you are) and family (thanks Mom for letting me use your basement) for supporting this sometimes profitable endeavor. But most importantly, thank you to all our readers, who make it all worthwhile.

Want to get in on the love fest? Follow us on Twitter, Friend us on Facebook, or just leave a comment below.

Keep Reading
By