off-topic 2026-08-23

I've been cycling for most of the last few decades and started capturing my cycling tips, reviews, favourite kit and components on Practicalli Cycling. I have 'pimped' the performance of my bikes this year, so flying downhill (I need to keep 'pimping' myself to get up those hills though laughcry ) Its also a from scratch website build with Zensical (rather than MkDocs), so its been a useful approach to help understand migration. https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/CJTRRQ857/p1787489212148469

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Nice! I used to do 30-80km rides several times a week several years ago but due to life changes haven't been able to be as consistent. Only thing that I don't see you mentioning that I personally find invaluable is a power meter, I feel pretty blind riding without one. Also I have a Garmin Edge 1030 whose lugs snapped off due to a kid knocking my bike over in a cycling shop, so it's just permanently glued to the mount which makes charging a bit annoying.

The newer Garmin computers have replacable lugs. You may get a 30% discount on a new Garmin the issue of broken lugs issue is raised with Garmin support (you have to send back the broken device first, so would be without a computer for a few weeks). There are kits to replace the back of the Garmin computer, but not that easy to change. Walkthrough of changing the cover are on YouTube. I have been happy with heart rate monitor and cadence sensor, so not got into power meters (which can be quite pricey) but many people do find them valuable. Thanks for sharing.

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Nice looking site and well put together. One question though: what do you mean by saying that titanium frames are the "heaviest option"? I'm sure there are exceptions but generally steel would be heavier than titanium unless it's a lower-end titanium frame? I ride a Lynskey and I've never felt a comparably priced steel frame that was lighter.

The site looks beautiful. I have been using Mkdocs Material (but have had enough of the plugin/version breakage issues), and been delaying a move to Zensical. I sooo much wish we had something like Zensical made in Clojure. Maybe someday.

@bhlieberman93 your right that Titanium is materially lighter than steel. Steel has greater rigidity though, so less material can be used in a frame. So weight comes down to design of the frame and Titanium design has greatly improved. So modern Titanium road bikes are typically lighter than most steel bicycle (although Reynolds frames are generally very light). It seems that most Titanium bikes are for off-road, so they are designed to take more punishment and therefore use more material and are heavier. I'll update the book and try convey this point succinctly. Thanks for rasing it.

@kumarshantanu as you probably know, issues around plugins was one of the drivers to start Zensical (and for the MkDocs 2 breaking changes) I didn't experience plugin issues myself (only used a few that came with Material). Once Zensical release the module system the situation should be vastly improved. For my needs, Zensical is 99% there (only missing a blog module). As Zensical replaces 'MkDocs' and 'Material for MkDocs' then it is more self contained project and well managed. Using Rust for Zensical makes it very fast to run. The install is still tied to Python at present, but using UV package manger and installing Zensical as a tool makes it simple (no virtual environment needed). A Clojure version would be interesting but I assume would be a significant investment in time and effort. I assume it would need to compile as a native binary or use Babashka to run (to give comparible start-up speed). I assume the main advantage of a Clojure version would be to write modules in Clojure to extent the features.

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