Trials AUSTRALIA is edited and maintained by Keith Jobson. He is however thankful for, and dependant on the contributions from many people.

Overall sponsorship:
- All the fees associated with hosting the site are paid for by Trials Victoria, the trials sub-committee of MAV.

• Newsletter contributors
• Photographs
• Results
  

Trials AUSTRALIA is the creation of Keith Jobson.

It started out being coded in raw HTML. Nowadays I use Dreamweaver.
For graphics editing I use Paint Shop Pro, eg. the main logo was created using PSP.
The photogallery thumbnail pages are created using Arles Image Web Page Creator.
The PDF files on the site are created using PDF995.

The original site was hosted by Connexus, a local Melbourne ISP. Shortly thereafter it moved to an OzEmail address.

In 1997 Trials AUSTRALIA obtained its current domain name (trials.com.au) and was hosted by WebCentral, a Brisbane-based company.

A few years later in the search for a cheaper host with more features, the site followed the likes of Trials Action and moved to Communitech, a US-based company.

In June 2003, with CT's service quality having gone to the dogs, it moved to Blue Virtual. It remains there to this day.

Advertising is available in the form of banner ads. See here for more info.

Keith Jobson has been involved in trials since 1995, after being bitten by the trials-bug when he spectated at a trials event at Mt. Bolton in Victoria. Riding C grade for a year or two he moved up to B grade where the challenge was more satisfying. Of late he has not been seen at many events as other committments require his attention.

Computers and the Internet have been a part of his life for many years. An embracer of technology, he cannot imagine life without the Internet.

Launch of Trials DownUnder website.

You can see the original message that launched the site via the aus.motorcycles newsgroup here, courtesy Google newsgroups.

Initial content of the site included:
* Dealers and Clubs
* "What's On" event listing
* the promise of a Classifieds page.

As a point of interest, Ian Johnston started the Trials Action website at about the same time.

Launch of Trials AUSTRALIA at www.trials.com.au.

After two years gradually building a reader base, a decision was made to obtain sponsorship from the Victorian Trials Sub-Committee (now Trials Victoria) and move the site to its own domain name.

This was a significant milestone in the life of Trials AUST, with the site content now including a Photo Gallery, Tech Tips, more newsletters and rider profiles.

Site hit-rate just before this move was around 450 hits per month, or 15 - 20 per day.

Read the aus.motorcycles launch release information here.

In the six months since moving to the new address, Trials AUSTRALIA had a threefold increase in hit rate. It was visited over 1400 times per month, or 50 - 60 per day. Each of these visitors then accessed on average 18 pages on the site.

Australian visitors to the site accounted for 57% of the total. (Graph here.)

Graph of May 1998 site hits here.

All states' newsletters are now being scanned and put onlilne, with a few received via email.

In the twelve months since the launch of the new site, Trials AUST had been visited 24,000 times.

The "Big Four" Australian trials importers - Gas Gas Motos Australia, DAVFIN Beta, Trialzone Bultaco & Scorpa, and TARPS Montesa - each have a presence on Trials AUST in the form of their own mini-website.

Site visits are increasing each month, growing to around 3500 sessions per month by the end of the year. Trials AUST experiences a major peak in visits in October, with thousands more visitors seeking information and results from the Australian Championships. October peak is over 5000 sessions.

Sometime this year the current-look Message Board was introduced.

The most frequently visited pages are the photo galleries.

Number of unique sessions per month to Trials AUST (counting each user only once in any 24 hr period) is around 11,000 (about 360 per day), serving around 2.5 gigabytes of data.

Graph of January 2002 stats here.*

The most popular pages are the Message Boards, and within that the Classifieds are the most active. There have been nearly 200 bikes advertised in the Trials AUST classifieds pages.

Another point of interest, Ian Johnston calls it a day and sells the Trials Action website. At the end of the year Trials Action is recording around 50,000 unique sessions, serving over 15 gigabytes of information per month.

* see Glossary for explanation of statistical terms.

For an interesting look back in time at Trials AUSTRALIA, check out the "Wayback Machine" Internet Archive site:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.trials.com.au

(Note: a lot of the front page photos will be missing, however the news articles are sure to bring back some memories!)

Hit: A hit is any response from the server on behalf of a request sent from a browser. This includes any response from the server, not only text files or documents. If, for example, a HTML page has two images embedded, the server generates three hits if this page is requested: one hit for the HTML page itself and two hits for the two inline images.

Files: If the user requests a document and the server successfully sends back a file for this request, this is counted as a Code 200 (OK) response. Any such response is counted for as a file. Again, "file" here means any kind of a file.

Pageviews: Pageviews are all files which either have a text file suffix (.html, .text) or which are directory index files. This number allows to estimate the number of "real" documents transmitted by your server. If defined correctly, the analyzer rates text files (documents) as pageviews. Those pageviews do not include images, CGI scripts, Java applets or any other HTML objects except all files ending with one of the pre-defined pageview suffixes, such as .html or .text.

Sessions: This is the number of unique hosts accessing the server during a given time-window.

KB Sent: This is the amount of data sent during the whole summary period as reported by the server.

PDF format files are preferred by me as there is much less work on my part.

I am aware of the problems with them, namely lack of progress indicator when downloading them, and the (sometimes) sheer size. However, given the fact of the first sentence, tough. ;-)

When you click on a PDF link, your browser will appear to do nothing until it has downloaded the entire file.

Approx. download times at 56K: 120KB = 30 seconds; 240KB = 1 minute

If after waiting long enough it still doesn't display, I suggest getting the latest reader and reinstalling. Adobe Acrobat Reader (free!):

Trials AUSTRALIA welcomes all contributions! Following the few tips below will make both our lives much easier...

Images:
Photos should be sent in JPG format which is a compressed format. As an indication, file size per photo should be no more than 300KB, give or take 100KB. Any more than that and unless intentional you're possibly doing something wrong.
There should be no spaces or special characters in the filenames, as I have to rename them before they go online.
Eg. "Me & dad on a rock.jpg" = BAD. "Me_and_dad_on_a_rock.jpg" = GOOD.

Results, Reports, Newsletters:
I prefer PDF format, however I can take whatever format you have - Word, RTF, Excel, PDF, Publisher, HTML.

Note on Word-created HTML files - any images in your file will likely be saved to a separate directory called [document name]_files. If you send me the [document name].HTML file, make sure you check for the other directory and send me that as well, otherwise I wont see the images in your document.

Send it to Email: keithj "at" trials.com.au

Trials AUSTRALIA is updated as items are received. This generally translates to 2 or 3 times per week. If you send me something just after I've finished another update, chances are that it may be a day or two before it appears online - I have another life too! ;-)

Over Christmas & January the frequency drops off as there are very few events being run and consequently no results etc being submitted.

In the beginning, it was a few hours a day. Through use of better software (Dreamweaver and Thumber), automation of some tasks (the Links and Classifieds pages), this has dropped to an average of around 45 minutes per day. I don't update it every day, but other days I'll spend 2 hours on it.

Got a question? Send it to me via the feedback page or email direct to Email: keithj "at" trials.com.au