November 7th, 2008
Welcome to the second blog post, merely a few days after the first one. Things have moved on a good few feet since the last update and although I will be undoubtedly be writing a blog entry over the weekend, there is only so long that news remains “fresh” and there is nothing worse than reading out of date news.
Links/ events/ contact us pages on line
As of a few days ago, the links/events and contact us pages went live, hopefully bringing the number of non existent pages down to 0! This is something which should have happened a long time ago and it is a great feeling to get all the pages on line. If you have a gallery/forum/group/ etc, feel free to leave a comment on this blog and I will add you to the links page.
IE browser problems being fixed
After loading buswatch.net up in IE (Internet Explorer) a few days ago and having seen how awful some of the pages looked I got down to work fixing the problems. I am pleased to be able to report that all the pages I have been on render the same now in IE7 as they do in Firefox. If you notice anything that does not look right, please contact me either through the blog or the contact us page on the website.
Blog link finally up
Hurragh, the blog link finally has gone up. The photo was chosen as it infers development and maintenence which are the main points of the blog. Having set this up though, I can also see this blog being used for all the group events and meetings etc as well as rally reviews. I also find the photo rather amusing (here is a link to the photo as it is in the BusWatch website: http://www.buswatch.net/imgvid.php?fileid=578&imgchk=2de0e1d488fc71c05f3b13d09d0162c9),
Matt Turner
Buswatch.net Admin
Posted in Website updates | No Comments »
November 3rd, 2008
Welcome to the first buswatch.net blog post. The idea behind the blog is to use it as a way of keeping everyone up to speed with the development of the BusWatch.net bus enthusiast’s site. This is no one way street however and comments would be very much appreciated (even the negative ones!). To enable the posts to be scan read, I think I will bullet point the changes which I have made to the website although this may change depending on feedback/ experience with this new fangled blogging thingy. So without further ado, lets jump straight into the changes which have been made to the website in the last few weeks.
Changes:
- Destination link removed from individual image page.
To begin with, I will start with a relatively minor update. It is now no longer possible to search BusWatch for images based on their destination either from the search on the main page or from the individual images. This decision was taken due to the destination making bus photos appear in searches where they should not, making the search results less relevant. An example of this would be getting a number of photos of buses in Nailsworth (with a destination of Cheltenham), when selecting Cheltenham as the destination.
- Search speed increased.
This is probably the biggest advancement for buswatch.net and concerns the search speed. Before the search script was refined, searches were taking ~ 8 seconds which was far too long and would only get longer as the number of photos in the database increased! With the new search script working, it should now only take between 2 ~ 4 seconds per search.
- Search – Can now navigate back from images after searching
Another search related update is the ability to navigate back to the searches after clicking on an image in the search results without being asked to resend the search data or an error being displayed on the screen. This was a big problem as a lot of the website revolves around the search page.
Tags: Search
Posted in Website updates | No Comments »