September improvements

@bhance Combined the two patches into one branch - looked like there was some interdependence between the two - I think this combined one will be easier to work on together
@bhance regarding your comment about a "better way" : 

This is the singleton pattern, where we want to make sure that there's only one instance of the class at any given time. That private __construct is what ensures this. There's no way to instantiate the class outside the class itself!

that's where the static method get_instance comes into play. You can use that anywhere throughout the plugin to get the single instance of the class. so to get the background instance (I just pushed this update) an equivalent statement to the `$background = new Bike_Index_Sync_Background; ` would be `$background = Bike_Index_Sync_Background::get_instance();`

It does the same thing, and keeps that protection in place.