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.