No Mod Required

The news just broke and many questions, of course, follow.

The biggest for me is- who will they bring and what will their intentions be?

Are they going to hedge their bets and hold back the Contadors, Klodens and Leipheimers of the world from a full-on GC push (so as to save them for Le Tour) or are they going there to take home the Maglia Rosa? There are no guarantees that they're going to get into the Tour, so this might be their biggest stage of the year.

Of course, there's also the question of fitness and form. One can't just turn it on for a three week stage race. Is anyone ready for such a thing? Have they been prepping "just in case?" So many questions and so little time to sort it all out in time for the start of the race.

Astana given place in Giro field

Organisers of the Giro d'Italia have invited the Astana team to compete in their tour at just one week's notice.

Astana, thrown out of last year's Tour de France for doping violations, were originally excluded from the event.

Astana given place in Giro field

In other Giro news, Petacchi is skipping the race due to bronchitis. Petacchi basically owns the Giro, so that might give some other people a shot at some stage wins. Sad to see him miss out though, as he really is a joy to watch when he's on form.

Bronchitis will keep Petacchi out of Giro d'Italia

[update]

Here's Astana's team for the race:

• Assan Bazayev
• Antonio Colom
• Alberto Contador
• Vladimir Gusev
• Maxim Iglinskiy
• Andreas Klöden
• Levi Leipheimer
• Andrey Mizurov
• Dmitriy Muravyev

Think they're going there to win? I do. That's a strong team. Whatever way you slice it, three guys who have finished on the podium of the Tour de France is a pretty solid foundation and Iglinsky and Gusev have shown me a lot over the past couple of years.

I do wonder who will be their main rider. It might be whoever ends up being on best form. Which is tough to judge in advance since "the big three" have all had pretty solid spring campaigns.

You know me. I'm always trying new stuff, so I did the Etsy thing tonight. So far, so good…

It was dead easy to set up and all of the tools available are really nicely put together.

Like this neat little widget:

Check out the full shop:

Etsy :: robreact :: Original Paintings by Rob React

I made the image in my gallery pages "hot" today. Each gallery image now points to the next image in the gallery flow. It'll be interesting to see if that increases the average number of page views per user. I'm thinking it will as a lot of people use that technique so I'll hopefully be leveraging that learned behavior. Logically it just makes sense as those back, home and next buttons are way too small. I'll report the results in a couple of weeks…

Check it out here.

I'm actually in the process of recoding all the gallery pages (with the exception of the alphabet I posted yesterday, which was built that way from the beginning) to have an actual anchor tag wrapped around the image. For now I'm doing it with a little bit of JavaScript:

var imgs = $("artimg").getElementsByTagName("img");
for (var i=0; i< imgs.length; i++) {
    imgs[0].onclick= function() {
        document.location.href=$("next").href;
    }
}

where "next" is the existing ID applied to the next link in gallery pages. I love being able to use such simple JavaScript to enhance the user experience in such a (potentially) large way.

As you might have seen on flickr, I did a full painted alphabet for the recent FutureArts show. Well, I finally got the paintings up on the web for your enjoyment. Check it out:

And, as a refresher, here's the display from the event:

Amazingly, there are several more updates/projects to be released over the next few days. Good times.