James Houston

Then

Now

I’ve given this site a refresh. I’d got a bit bored of how slowly the old WordPress site loaded, so I’ve moved it to a static site. The pages are now built in advance rather than each time someone visits, which makes it much quicker. The home page responds in about a tenth of a second, compared with around two seconds before.

All the old posts are still here at the same web addresses, including the race diaries, tours, knitting and films. I’ve also got rid of the cookie banner, as the site no longer uses cookies.

If you find anything that’s broken or missing, please let me know.

I’ve built an app to use with my car, called Caramble. It’s an iPhone app, and it does a few things I wanted. It’s a bit like having Strava for cars.

Recording drives

Every drive is recorded automatically, without me having to touch the phone at all. There’s a small Bluetooth beacon in the car, wired so that it only comes on with the ignition. When the phone picks it up, it starts recording, and when I switch the engine off, the drive ends. Each one is saved with its route on a map, how long it took, and how much of that time I was actually moving.

Fuel and the logbook

When I fill up, I take a photo of the petrol pump and one of the odometer, in either order, and the app reads the figures from them. It logs the fill-up and keeps a running figure for the fuel consumption, which is 36.7 mpg so far. It also corrects automatically for the small discrepency between odometer reading and actual distance travelled as measured with GPS.

The London Clarion’s new publications archive is now online. It has 114 of the club’s magazines, newsletters and programmes, 2,393 pages in all, from the very first issue of The Clarion Cyclist in July 1936 right up to The Clarion of May 2026. They’re all free to read as page-turning books, either on the archive’s own site or on the club’s website.

The club secretary asked me to build it. The magazines had been on Issuu, which was costing the club a lot and surrounded them with off-putting adverts. The new archive doesn’t have any adverts, and costs the club nothing to run.

Reading

Click on a cover and the issue opens as a book. You can turn the pages with a click or a swipe, zoom in on the small print, or switch to a scroll view if you’d rather read down the page. It remembers where you got to, and if you share a link, it shows the issue’s cover.