Contact me: alan [at] eightlane [dot] com

Welcome to eightlane!

Eightlane is a UK running community designed for athletes. Check out the unique news aggregator, discussion forums, and open training tools that everyone can view. Eightlane was launched on September 16th, 2007 as an athletics-specific site that helps take the difficulty out of finding good and relevant news from a large pool of web pages. There are many great websites producing useful articles that aren't being read because they're lost in a haystack of feeds that most readers don't have time to aggregate by themselves. Dedicated athletics feeds are shown on the homepage within an hour of publication, and major news sites that provide sports feeds are filtered so that only relevant athletics news is published on the homepage. Sometimes the odd aussie-rules football result may slip through the net but overall the system tends to hold up well.

Of course, there are plenty of great websites that cannot be included automatically as old web page design templates sometimes don't allow the facility to export news. This is a shame as a large potential readership is being left out because viewers don't want to have to visit dozens of websites to find a good read! To this end, eightlane is mutually beneficial to website owners and readers: the readers find the articles they want, and the owners get clickthroughs and better search engine rankings from incoming links. The best and most popular feeds are ranked on each page, so you don't have to go through the main list on the homepage when you're in a rush.

For those great articles, or results, or even a blog post that aren't part of a news feed, we allow manual submissions. Web 2.0 is all about ease of sharing good and relevant sources, so feel free to help keep us updated with the best athletics sources on the internet that you come across that we are unable to process directly.

Eightlane was created by Loughborough University graduate Alan Wales after seeing a need for a single portal to bring together the dozens of great athletics websites regularly updating their stories. Alan has utilised the last seven years of his web design knowledge to create a site that is fluid, standards-compliant, simple to use and open to everyone. This site combines the latest web technologies (ajax, php, mysql, xhtml and css) styled simply for functionality.