NorCal (Bay Area) DRIVE Chat Thread

[BigFatFlip]

Originally Posted by PMok

ok, so I rotated the top text back so it's centered. call it v3.1.

Sweetness!

Originally Posted by PMok

...and another exciting announcement to make too...

Ooooh, the suspense is killing me....


Off-topic, what are people's thoughts on some "helping the community" stuff? A posting (Sac) kinda got me inspired. Back in my WRX days, we used to do car shows for benefits. I also remember doing toy drives and dropping off presents to the Oakland children's hospital around xmas time with my bike group. I'm thinking some early morning drives and finishing up with some do-good'n?

[PMok]

OK so now that the big Spring meet/drive is behind us... back to the business at hand!

I started mentioning this to a few people at the meet yesterday, but I have started creating a website/domain for us to use. Introducing...

http://www.86drive.com

It's just a basic blog-type site for now using WordPress. It will probably be reworked, redesigned, improved. But we have big plans for it.

Why create a new site or club, when we already have FT86club and the Norcal 86 Owner's Club? I'll try to explain. Here is our little manifesto, or at least a draft of it that is in the About section of the site for now.

We are a group of driving enthusiasts primarily driving the Toyota 86, Scion FR-S, and Subaru BRZ sports cars (we’ll refer to them all as 86s for simplicity’s sake). The 86s are great fun to modify, customize, and talk about. There are plenty of car clubs who get together and hang out somewhere and just talk about their cars. That’s all well and good. But the defining characteristic of our organization, is that we love to DRIVE! Whether it’s at the racetrack, the local autocross, or our favorite twisty backroad, our passion for driving is so strong that we are eager to wake up early, sometimes before dawn, in order to get out there and enjoy the road while it is clear. Or to drive long distances to get to a track/autocross. Our passion motivates us to get together with other like-minded individuals, and share the fun. And so this website was born. This site will be our communication channel to share news, upcoming events, and coverage of recent drives. Please stay tuned for future updates, we are just getting started!

So we have a few things we still want to get worked out before we go fully live with this. We need to decide on a final logo or branding direction. We have ideas now from me, @overlookedx , and @bignrichlll so far. I'd like to see who else has any ideas, get those worked up into final proposals, and then we can have a poll to decide which one(s) we go with. I'd be open to using more than one if everyone really likes two different designs, and/or variations on the design. We could certainly have different designs for (1) website, (2) decals, (3) t-shirts and the like. @MyRx has volunteered to help get us business cards to hand out once that's all resolved.

Then the website design and content/contributors. We need volunteers for this as my web design skills are sorely lacking. @overlookedx you mentioned interest in helping with design/content yesterday. You, and everyone else who is interested in this, let me know if you want to be involved! No pressure, but we could use some creativity here and it's definitely a group effort. I just bought the domain name but this site belongs to us as a group and it's meant to serve us as a group, not be some kind of vanity thing for me or a select few. If I wanted that I would have made it PMok.com or something haha.

What does it take to join us? Not much, really. A little energy, passion, committment. Enough to come out to join us on one of our morning drives or meet with us from time to time. If you want to help plan things or suggest ideas for events/drives, that's awesome and we'd love to hear it.

Let me be clear, this is certainly not a replacement for FT86Club or Norcal 86 Owner's club. Not really direct competition either in my mind. The site is meant to be a go-to spot where for instance, if you've been busy and wanted to get a quick update on whether there are any meets or drives coming up, you type in the easy-to-remember site name and boom, you can see what's coming up on the schedule, or see what you missed in recent events. Like the MR2 site I posted up www.mr2sday.info which just keeps it nice and simple. We'll still come on FT86Club to discuss the usual things, help plan meets and events, share our random thoughts in off topic etc.

Originally Posted by BigFatFlip

Off-topic, what are people's thoughts on some "helping the community" stuff? A posting (Sac) kinda got me inspired. Back in my WRX days, we used to do car shows for benefits. I also remember doing toy drives and dropping off presents to the Oakland children's hospital around xmas time with my bike group. I'm thinking some early morning drives and finishing up with some do-good'n?

I think this is a great idea. We should definitely try to do something good for the community. I remember one time we had a random meet, but afterwards @JackSmiley and I went into the mall, picked up some toys, and then went to another charity car meet/toy drive to drop off the toys. There were about 7 tables worth of toys gathered at that meet and it felt awesome to help in some little way. I don't have a ton of free time (or I'm too selfish and want to spend it driving! ) but I'd like this to be something we do from time to time.

OK that was a serious essay right there. Let me know your thoughts guys!

[PMok]

uhh... don't everyone jump in at once now.


tomorrow night I'm gonna be joining the MR2sday crew at the Sonic in Hayward... we'll do a little meet, eat, and DRIVE on Palomares Rd after work! We meet at 7:30PM if anyone wants to come join us.

April 30, 2013 (Tuesday) 7:30PM MR2sdays Meet @ Sonic Drive-In & DRIVE Palomares Rd
31187 Mission Blvd, Hayward, CA 94544
this is an MR2 meet so I'll be taking my MR2, but if you're free stop by to say hi or join us on the drive! Other cars are welcome, it's pretty casual.
More Info: http://www.mr2oc.com/showthread.php?t=465286
added to the Events page on 86drive.com

[overlookedx]

Originally Posted by PMok

uhh... don't everyone jump in at once now.

Haha.. thank and forget...

But really, the weekend just ended and that big bbq took a lot out of me! I need time to recover and start thinking about ways to go with the website. I just took a look and noticed you've put some content in there already, so its off to a good start. And pictures from this weekend will serve well to use for banners, images, etc.

I think the number one content piece on the site is the calendar though, so we should see if there's a Wordpress theme that has the calendar as front and center. I didn't even see the events tab til I was almost done looking at the site.

Anyway, I'm gonna try and take some time tonight to jot down some notes. One suggestion though, get rid of the splash screen when you first get to the site, you don't see those around anymore and it just ends up confusing people/being an extra step to get to the site.

[PMok]

Originally Posted by overlookedx

Haha.. thank and forget...

But really, the weekend just ended and that big bbq took a lot out of me! I need time to recover and start thinking about ways to go with the website. I just took a look and noticed you've put some content in there already, so its off to a good start. And pictures from this weekend will serve well to use for banners, images, etc.

I think the number one content piece on the site is the calendar though, so we should see if there's a Wordpress theme that has the calendar as front and center. I didn't even see the events tab til I was almost done looking at the site.

Anyway, I'm gonna try and take some time tonight to jot down some notes. One suggestion though, get rid of the splash screen when you first get to the site, you don't see those around anymore and it just ends up confusing people/being an extra step to get to the site.

LOL I was just kidding a little, I know that meet was fun but tiring. Yeah I started to add content yesterday as I was sitting at home with not much to do while waiting for video to encode haha. Good points on the calendar and the splash screen. That screen is really just the result of me being inexperienced/cautious and installing the WP module into a subfolder: 86drive.com/wp
Then I just needed something to replace the "coming soon" page that GoDaddy starts you off with and I don't know how to automatically redirect to the next page. So I kind of kludged the splash page. And is there a way to get to the wp page but still have the URL say just 86drive.com? Or should we just start over and reinstall the wp into the top root directory.

Why don't you PM me your email and I'll get you set up to have some admin privileges, some of these things you can probably fix faster than me. I hadn't really done much HTML since school days and believe me, that was a long while ago.

[BigFatFlip]

Originally Posted by PMok

uhh... don't everyone jump in at once now.

Originally Posted by overlookedx

I think the number one content piece on the site is the calendar though, so we should see if there's a Wordpress theme that has the calendar as front and center. I didn't even see the events tab til I was almost done looking at the site.

^This was gonna be my main suggestion. I think we can still have the "blog" format where we can have videos, pics, etc. but I've always envisioned this site being a way to keep track of upcoming drives, so a calendar or a rolling list of upcoming events should be front-center. For example, say I've not been to the forums lately, but I'm free next sat for a drive, I check the site, hey! drive event at 7am, awesome, done.

I'll look at it some more tonight and post more thought if I have them...

Originally Posted by PMok

tomorrow night I'm gonna be joining the MR2sday crew at the Sonic in Hayward... we'll do a little meet, eat, and DRIVE on Palomares Rd after work! We meet at 7:30PM if anyone wants to come join us.

I might actually be able to join ya, but on the other hand, I'm a total wuss about driving at night...

[Clipdat]

Speaking of early drives, when I was on Mines Rd I kept thinking to myself "Man, this would be awesome at 7am with no traffic!"

Originally Posted by BigFatFlip

I check the site, hey! drive event at 7am, awesome, done.

[PMok]

Originally Posted by BigFatFlip

^This was gonna be my main suggestion.

I might actually be able to join ya, but on the other hand, I'm a total wuss about driving at night...

yeah definitely agree calendar should be front and center with blog being maybe sidebar or link to it. and starting to think that maybe the images from past events should go into a gallery or something like that. heck it could even just be a link to an album in Photobucket or what have you if it's too much trouble to maintain a separate gallery on site. I bought the economy site so not too many frills haha. Maybe we need to get some t-shirt and mug sales going so we can fund the site expansion LOL.

come on out! sunset won't be until about 8...

[86_ZN6]

Plato i have a a suggestion to make

ill PM you in a bit

[PMok]

so I had another fun night out with the other side of the family, in the MR2. thanks to @BigFatFlip for joining us. Hope those MR2 guys didn't tease you too much.

[PMok]

So I was thinking, who's up for another morning drive on Saturday... I was thinking we could do a little East Bay drive (I know, I always favor the East Bay... but here's the reason!) and then head over to Milpitas for the Simplicity in Sound open house that @brianlo622 posted up? And for us hard core DRIVE fiends who are not that obsessed over amps and dynamat we can talk a little about the 86DRIVE website design and ideas etc.

[BigFatFlip]

Originally Posted by PMok

so I had another fun night out with the other side of the family, in the MR2. thanks to @BigFatFlip for joining us. Hope those MR2 guys didn't tease you too much.

Haha, that wasn't too bad. I was pretty surprised with the guy in the geo though, I was just planning for a little cruise in the back but then had to keep up with him. I was pretty tired but that drive got my blood going, just had to squeeze in Redwood rd. on the way home.

Originally Posted by PMok

So I was thinking, who's up for another morning drive on Saturday... I was thinking we could do a little East Bay drive (I know, I always favor the East Bay... but here's the reason!) and then head over to Milpitas for the Simplicity in Sound open house that @brianlo622 posted up? And for us hard core DRIVE fiends who are not that obsessed over amps and dynamat we can talk a little about the 86DRIVE website design and ideas etc.

Damn P, you're killing me! I'm pretty iffy this Sat., a huge maybe if its only a couple of hours. Made plans with the wife to make up for being gone all last Sat .

[finch1750]

Originally Posted by PMok

So I was thinking, who's up for another morning drive on Saturday... I was thinking we could do a little East Bay drive (I know, I always favor the East Bay... but here's the reason!) and then head over to Milpitas for the Simplicity in Sound open house that @brianlo622 posted up? And for us hard core DRIVE fiends who are not that obsessed over amps and dynamat we can talk a little about the 86DRIVE website design and ideas etc.

Im a maybe. I have a viewing for a death in my gf's family this week but dont know when yet. I also want both my doors to unlock with only on push. lol

[finch1750]

Originally Posted by PMok

ok, so I rotated the top text back so it's centered. call it v3.1.



We can discuss more at tomorrow's meet in person! :happy0180:
and another exciting announcement to make too...

Totally killer logo there P. Perfect I think. While I havent messed with it in while I did take some web design courses at CC a while back. Would be good practice for me as I may need to start helping my part time job with a website. Let me know if/ how i can help