Friday Fun Facts (News Tidbits)

Thank God It’s Friday…it’s never a slow news day

It looks like adidas has put Reebok up for sale. And Suunto could be buying them. Well, Anta Holdings are being mooted as a possible buyer and they own Amer who own Suunto.

Canyon bikes could be up for sale too at a sweet Eu500m price tag. Carlyle and Apax are possible buyers and those same old names keep cropping up.

Final Surge has announced that structured running power workouts that you create for free on their site are now piped through to Stryd, for free. You can then execute them with power alerts on either the Apple Watch or the Garmin CIQ app. I tried that in beta a couple of weeks back on the Apple Watch and it’s pretty cool. The downside is the paywall that Stryd might add for their training plan sync functionality in 6 months (ish) time, which as things stand now WILL affect the sync of your own workouts from FS (I suspect this will change). Putting that to one side, I can recommend the FREE structured workout creator that FS offer, they say it will stay free for life and you can use that NOW to create and schedule your Garmin  workouts well into the future for free (you can’t do that with TrainingPeaks for free). Details: Final Surge.

Hammerhead Karoo/Karoo 2 has added a lot of interface improvements that I’m probably not going to cover this time. Link here. The Karoo 2 is sold out but taking pre-orders HERE for holiday delivery

I am working on ‘something interesting’ for the next week, so stay tuned for breaking news. No, it’s not the Fenix 7.

Site Changes:

Changes

• I hope the site is performing better for you. It should be faster as I have introduced some clever new webp imagery and new caching tweaks. This will, obviously, break ‘something’, ‘somewhere else.’ Hopefully, it hasn’t.
• If you are looking at the site on a smartphone then the ‘AMP’ version of the site should be sweetly speedy. Tip: if you add /amp/ to the end of almost all my URLs they might change it to a cleaner reading format for you.
• I have always had the LATEST posts MENU option on the current version of the site. You would be surprised at how hard things like that can be to achieve with some WordPress themes. However, what was harder (IMPOSSIBLE, the developers said) was to change the mobile site so that it defaults to the same list of latest posts. I like being told things are impossible and so a few weeks ago that I DID manage to make the mobile site appear as if it is showing all the latest posts!!! he he he. It took about 3 months from start to finish and I am very proud of myself even though only about 3 of you probably noticed. The technical solution was to create a single multi-category URL (which I knew how to do) and then stick that into a WordPress function that I eventually found. #Sorted

Problems

• I know some of the image carousels truncate images and do not display properly, especially on AMP. I’ve informed the developer but I think it’s deeper than their responsibility and that it is WordPress who need to do something to the underlying code. Anyway, I can’t change it other than changing the type of carousel but then that will not work so well on the desktop version. #Sigh
• Naturally, as I’ve speeded up the site I have to add more ads to slow it down and annoy people. Sorry! I REALLY would rather not do that, all you have to do is help in other areas and if enough of you do that, I’ll turn them off. Now is the time of year when more companies want to advertise, so you might see more ads than normal. Actually, it’s NOT really me that’s adding more ads. It’s my ad broker and the advertisers responding to your recent browsing habits.
• Sometimes ad units resize themselves and jump over the page. I REALLY DO NOT WANT THAT TO EVER HAPPEN. If you get that please let me know exactly where on the page it happens as it could be happening to you but not to me or others. I will then get the ad broker to sort it out –  the ad broker is responsive on that particular issue. Similarly, if anything also starts automatically playing audio please let me know as that falls into the same category and should not be happening (I don’t think it is).

Site Improvements

• If there is anything you think I should be doing please let me know.
• I’m getting quite a lot of private emails, private Facebook comments and private tweets. More in total than comments on the site! I do answer them all. Some of them ask the same question. Unless you want to remain confidential then please comment on the blog.
• Some private requests and some public ones are asking me to ‘review X, Y or Z’ or to test a certain combination of things. These requests will always be added to the list of stuff to do and requests from supporters usually get put higher up the list…just sayin’. It’s a long list.
• I can and do now turn off ads on certain kinds of content. I have to do this manually on a post by post basis (PITA) and currently, I aim to make some of the more serious reviews ad-free. So if you only come here for the reviews then all should be good for you.
• I’ve had requests to produce a newsletter. I haven’t got the time to do that as a separate exercise but I might be able to add the ability for you to sign up for email notifications and then that might have the option for you to get daily, weekly or instant ‘digests’. Would that be useful? I have long been aware that I need to do this but I didn’t especially want the responsibility of extra GDPR and holding on to your email addresses.
• FYI: most WordPress sites will let you subscribe to new CATEGORY or TAG classified content eg https://the5krunner.com/category/review/feed/ or https://the5krunner.com/category/garmin/feed/ are just two of MANY such category/tags that are automatically on this site. I like RSS but I think I’m the only one left.
• I did introduce some smartphone notification tool a while back but no-one used it so that’s now gone.
• If anyone wants to volunteer to help out with disabling ads for subscribers then there is a free lifetime supporter status in it for you. I used to know what to do to achieve this and I did have it working over a year ago, I’ve simply forgotten how to do it and it took me quite a while the first time. Subsequently, the ad broker changed their plugin code and it broke my solution. A new solution is probably twofold: creating a custom WordPress plugin (just a line of code from memory) and then changing my script for the loading of the custom plugin depending on the user’s supporter status. If you know what you are doing, I don’t think it will be hard as I managed to previously do it without knowing what I was doing!
• USA Only: In some of my links I have multiple US-only retailers that show as options where you can buy the item. Target, Walmart, Walgreen and sometimes many others up to about 12. I would like to rationalise that list of generic retailers down to 2. Which do you think I should use? ie which discounters generally offer cheap stock and a wide range. (I’m excluding power meter city, competitive cyclist and REI who I will keep using). thank you