---
id: velotweets
title: VeloTweets
summary: A 2009 site that gathered professional cyclists’ tweets into one grid, built by Luke Francl, Norm Orstad, Chris Hatch, and me.
collection: Historical projects
status: retired
url: https://web.archive.org/web/20090514063346/http://www.velotweets.com/
started: 2009-05-10
topics:
  - automation
  - open-web
sources:
  - kind: website
    url: https://web.archive.org/web/20090514063346/http://www.velotweets.com/
    role: archive
connections: []
page: https://thingelstad.xyz/things/velotweets/
---

# VeloTweets

A 2009 site that gathered professional cyclists’ tweets into one grid, built by Luke Francl, Norm Orstad, Chris Hatch, and me.

VeloTweets, “the Pulse of the Peloton,” collected the Twitter posts of professional road cyclists in one place. In early 2009 I had started following riders such as Lance Armstrong through their RSS feeds and noticed that, read together, they gave a first-person view of the peloton during races. VeloTweets included only pro riders and a few others in the sport, added each rider’s team and nationality, and showed each rider once in a grid with their most recent message, so frequent posters did not crowd out everyone else. It also gathered TwitPic photos as VeloPics, kept a race calendar, and ran a Message of the Day tied to the day’s racing.

It was a side project with no budget and no business behind it. The idea was mine. Luke Francl did most of the development, in Rails 2.3; Norm Orstad designed the site; Chris Hatch built the list of riders and filled in their profiles; and I “played sweeper,” helping wherever I could. The grid came out of a working session: I credit Norm’s comparison to a baseball card, and Luke credits me with showing one tweet per rider. Luke [announced the site on Rail Spikes](https://web.archive.org/web/20090514074605/http://railspikes.com/2009/5/10/announcing-velotweets) on May 10, 2009, and I followed two days later with [Introducing VeloTweets](https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/05/12/introducing-velotweets-the.html) and [Why do Cyclists Tweet?](https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/05/12/why-do-cyclists-tweet.html).

The last Internet Archive capture of the working site is from [March 2010](https://web.archive.org/web/20100318125905/http://www.velotweets.com/); by [February 2011](https://web.archive.org/web/20110202042105/http://www.velotweets.com/) velotweets.com was a parked domain. In 2014 I listed @VeloTweets among the Twitter accounts I had deleted ([Twitter Spam #NFL](https://www.thingelstad.com/2014/11/28/twitter-spam-nfl.html)).