Thank Goodness something to ramble about

Colin Spiller kindly sent us this article from the BBC via the site feedback. He thought I might find it interesting and he wasn't wrong, apart from anything else it gives me something to ramble on about here.

I figured I would use Pubs Galore to analyse their report, this is in no way scientific as I realise that Pubs Galore has a long way to go to become an absolute list, but it is coming on in leaps and bounds thanks to the members efforts.

Anyway towns they mention claiming most pubs, our counts are of opened pubs, someone else will have to supply the population, the number in brackets excludes the outlying regions that we put lower down the town screens, that will be even less correct though:
Glasgow - 601 (492)
Bewdley - 19 (18)
Bollington (sub of Macclesfield) - (12)
Weymouth - 86 (73)
Witney - 64 (27)
Saffron Walden - 33 (14)
St. Albans - 92 (53)
Rugby - 94 (48)

Also they say there are 5 pubs in Manningtree, so someone needs to let us know which one we are missing! Along with the 2 in Otley, 1 in Beeston and 75 in Brighton and Hove (a well researched area) which we are apparently missing.

Actually to be honest it was the body of the article that I found more interesting as it touches on some of the problems we have running the site.

What is a town? My goodness if I had a penny for every person who tries to correct our geography (well I wouldn't have that much, but it is a popular question). We are frequently told towns should be separated out, and that some town is in a different county, or indeed the old classic that there is no more Avon (just in case we still use that one to avoid having to put Bristol in 3 different counties). We do constantly try and improve this bit of the system, but it is quite difficult with so many perceptions of how it should work. In general we stick with the old Postal Counties and now with the addition of Google Maps that has made it a lot easier for everyone. But if you do know the magic solution, let us know as we have had no end of beer fueled debates about how to improve it.

What is a pub? Another one that foils us, our lists were build off some badly constructed data, and occasionally included weird community centres, a lot of hotels, and other weirdness. That is now being eradicated by constant correction by our members, but we are also seeing oddities creeping in, our members aren't sure if Hotels are allowed or not (we are letting them decide), also night clubs. The whole thing is a mine field we will have to wait and see how it all evolves, feel free to contribute to that though, we welcome your opinions on our forums.

A brief editorial comment before I move on to the and finally, I try not to name the member if they have informed me through feedback as it can be more private, whereas if I am plucking the information off our forum or pubs galore site I will copy the name, so if you send me feedback and don't mind me crediting you, please let me know. We try and give credit wherever possible.

And finally they mention most popular pub names, we only have 703 pubs with names like Red Lion (another challenge for our members to find the 53 we are missing), but our top 5 are (I know the Red Lion is only saying 462 there, but that is because for my original count I just looked for any pub with Red Lion in the name, this time I went for [The] Red Lion, there is also things like Red Lion Coaching House, Red Lion On the Green, etc.):

The Red Lion - 462
The Royal Oak - 442
The New Inn - 291
The Crown Inn - 290
The White Hart - 245

Server Maintenance (2nd Friday, Day 17)

Well the ongoing issues of server maintenance continue, I was due to have finished today and then some minor tweaks next week. Whilst putting on the finishing touches I noticed that we had not been provided with the server we requested off our service providers. Whilst it was not a major issue we were trying to prepare for the future with our choice of server, and the mistake meant the server was underpowered, so we have had to hassle the service providers and they are sorting it for us now, it has however meant my last 2 days work is wasted. Still at least I am now qualified to go and work on a Government IT project with all the stuff that has gone wrong in the last couple of weeks.

Thanks to one of our members who let us know we had killed our forums as well, that one was sadly our fault, but they are at least working now.

Also to congratulate our members on their news awareness, following the explosion in Leeds they have promptly updated our listing for the Florence Nightingale, it is actually amazing the promptness of these reports and good to see.

And finally (I learnt that one off the news) James Joines, one of our exceptional contributors to the site demonstrates that either he is guilty of drink reviewing, or his keyboard needs new batteries, the Park Inn (Leeds), just in case he corrects it, his recommendation reads "First fllor bar in this Hotel where you cn dronk York, Yorkshire Terrier whisl looking out over the river."

Anyway I am off to follow his lead and try out some of teh lcal bears.

Server & Self Maintenance

Another boring day I am afraid, the new live server is now prepped and waiting for me to set up all the sites on it, also I have been to the hospital to get my now regular bone marrow aspirate to ensure that my Leukaemia is not trying to sneak back.

Pubs Galore down (and up again)

Whilst preparing to migrate our servers to live a kindly tech at our hosts has spannered up and repointed our domain inaccurately.

If you are trying to connect to pubs galore apologies, we are working to correct this as quickly as possible. Whatever we manage though for some of you the site is going to be unavailable for 24 hours.

All fixed now, once again sorry to anyone that affected.

Server Maintenance (Second Monday)

Sadly the server maintenance is ongoing, in more positive news it now picks up the pace as we have completed the development box, I now have to kick on by setting up a new live box, this is a lot easier though as I have done most things once and the documentation becomes a cut and paste issue, so we should be well finished by the end of the week.

As part of this we are doing preparations ready for a switch, it would appear one of those has killed our site, so sorry about that. We have acted as quickly as possible to bring the site back, it is sadly our hosts fault.

One of my favourite features on pubs galore is the pub crawls, they are run using the excellent Google Maps and have some very nice code behind them (but then I would say that). They do have their quirks though, they are firmly designed with driving in mind (what can you expect from an American company ;-) ) this can lead to some amusing routes, I had to laugh when I saw the map for that crawl, what initially jumped out was the ridiculous long route betweem the Crown and the Dog and Duck, then as I looked closer I saw the route between the 3 Greyhounds and the Spice Of Life, from the maps they must be 10 meters apart but the route suggest is nearly half a kilometers walk. Don't let that put you off though, the pub crawl interface is good fun.

Server Maintenance (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday)

Sorry about the lag of entries (I did actually write Tuesday's but was so incompetent I didn't publish it). To be honest there is not a lot to report anyway, the site continues to tick over and we are replying to all feedback, approving all pictures and pubs. In terms of the maintenance, it continues apace, we have a development environment again and are migrating all our sites and testing that they work with the newer software.

Anyway better get back to it!

Server Maintenance (Monday)

Well I had a nice quiet weekend to try and prepare for this week, I hate server work and this week promises to be a corker as we try and recommision 2 of our servers. Started off smoothly enough, but we will see how it all develops.

Over the weekend I had a couple of pieces of feedback through the pubs galore site where members felt that other members were not using the site in an ideal way. It did raise some interesting questions though, we are getting some exceptional members on the site and they do use the site in different ways. We actually don't really have a mission for the site, long term we would like to make it profitable and believe that can be done by approaching pubs and brewers with enhanced services. For the actual members though the real target is to make the site as enjoyable as possible, we are quite flexible and interested to see how it all evolves. There will be places where we do things in the way we believe is right, we constantly try to keep the focus of the site positive, we don't want it to turn into a pub complaints site.

If you have any strong opinions on how the site should be used, or who it should cater for, feel free to vent on the forums, we are interested and try to take it all on board and want to see the community around the site evolve the site.

Thank Crunchie

Well after yesterday not a lot to report. I am pretty much entrenched in my admin role at the moment, we have been sorting out a replacement box today, that looks like it is about there so on Monday I will see if I can get it all installed correctly to make it our new development kit. As well as that I am working towards switching my office machine to Vista, something I am not sure about, but my current machine is slowly grinding to a halt so time to bite the bullet.

Right now I am looking forward to a drink though, I hate doing all this change with computers, I just end up wondering what I am about to break.

Hope you have a good weekend

One of those days

Since I started doing this blog I have actually managed to remain fairly dedicated to development of Pubs Galore, but we do run other sites and do the odd bit of work with other independants. Also we control a few servers and the like.

Well after that first paragraph you may guess that I became distracted today, sadly I blew up our development server and have had to nurse it all day, gradually I am bringing it back to life but it will never be the same again. With this in mind we have decided to do an upgrade of our development and major live server, this sadly is going to put the kibosh on development until it is complete. I'll try and keep up to date here on how it is progressing though.

I am not sure if anyone watched the Apprentice, but as expected it was very painful, why did both teams feel they needed a gimmick, what is wrong with a good old fashioned pie and chips?

Yawn

Well another day learning about AJAX stuff, what I am doing should actually be quite simple, but I am learning on the fly, so apologies for my slowness, hopefully the results will be worth it.

If you are as boring as me you will be watching The Apprentice tonight, I actually watch it regularly, I'm not normally a fan of reality TV, but I do find this one worth a laugh, although it does seem to get a little more outrageous with each series. The reason I mention it however is that tonights task is to do with running a pub (albeit a gastro one) and to try and make a success of it (for one day I think). I doubt it will be too educational but hopefully they will mention a bit about the plight of pubs at the moment and give a bit of cheap promotion, also I am sure the show will lead to the inevitable quote about them trying to organise a piss-up in a brewery.

The wave of Web 2.0

Hi, firstly just a warning, this is a really boring entry and probably a but techy with no funny news in it, so possibly switch off now.

Today I have been looking a little more at this adding links to towns, but as with all our work I am trying to take the opportunity to improve on what we have already done (sadly this is the bit I find interesting). In IT it has been the buzz for a while to look at Web 2.0, I have to admit I have never really been that clear on what it really means, but that doesn't stop me trying to do it. So with Pubs Galore we are trying to make sure it is as good as we can make it, I sadly doubt it will ever be a Facebook site (sadly because I would love all that money), but we can try and embrace the changes this sort of site has bought to the way you do your work.

Anyway to our links, today I have been trying to learn a little more about what you can do using AJAX (wikipedia link), which to be honest these days is pretty much another word for JavaScript. What I am trying to do though is make it that you can add a link to a City and have it waiting there for approval without the page ever reloading. If you add a link to a pub you will have to go through 2 reloads, 1 as you switch the page to accept edits, then another as you send all that edited information to us. The current vogue is to cut back on this. It does have its drawbacks though, sites tend to go slower when they have more of this fancy stuff, and also can be hard to get working on older machines. With this in mind it is always a worry pushing forwards, but I do think that Pubs Galore is all about a rich experience, with lots of pictures, maps and information constantly linking, so it will never be the quickest site but hopefully one day the best.

Let me know if you think Pubs Galore is getting any of this wrong.

Cleaning up

As ever Monday involves the normal email trawl, a few interesting things to do and some feedback from the pubs galore web site to reply to.

A lot of the actual work today has been to go through our error logs and check if the new site version released on Friday has caused any issues, remarkably I could only see 1 issue and that relates to admin related work, so is not a big worry.

Having done this and cleaned up a few house cleaning jobs that were left on the site I wrote some stuff to put on the front page of the site (if that is the reason you have found this blog, Hello!)

At the same time we have added a page to the site to show relevant campaign web sites. If you know of any others just let us know.

I have just started work to try and allow us to show links to relevant sites from the town pages, we are increasingly seeing some brilliant blogs or dedicated town sites that relate to one town and have amazing pub histories and the like on them, but aren't really relevant to just one pub. We want to give these more visibility as they deserve to be seen so I am just trying to work out the best way of letting this happen.

Just a quick one today as I am working a little later than planned. I have successfully released the new version of the site. If you look at any pub where users have done anything (submitted photos, recommendations or reviews) then under the address is a small link saying see activity for this pub. Clicking on this will show a report with the timeline of everything that happened.

There are a few minor glitches in it, but in general it is fairly good, and going forward it should only improve. I will keep an eye on things and update the front page of the site either over the weekend or Monday.

For now I am off to grab a beer and try and enjoy the last 5 minutes of sun, hope you have a good weekend!

Odd jobs

Today has been another one that was a bit of a write off, ended up doing a lot more of my maintenance work than my development work. We were getting warnings off one of our servers that there could be an infection on it (thankfully it is all clear), but that will always take up time as you need to make sure that everything is secure if you get even the slightest hint.

Also I have been working on another project again that I occasionally get caught up in with a friend, as it is commercial I cant really comment on it, but it is one that is fun for me.

Other than that I sorted out some of the key preparation for the new pubs galore release, I am optimistic that will happen tomorrow now, although I haven't done the last test yet, so will have to pass that before I can definitely say.

News today is all about a job that sounds good. I think that is excellent doing that, originally Pubs Galore was intended more to be about networking old drinking buddies, and we still see a little of that filtering through in recommendations on the site, it is an area I hope we can do more about as we keep going forward, pubs should be social places (that means quieter music some of them as well).

Cars are too expensive (or a day off)

Not at all relevant to Pubs Galore but my car is being MOT'd today, darn those things are too expensive to run. Whilst doing this though my day kind of evolved into a day off, and on top of that I haven't spotted any interesting news to try and make it look like I have something to say.

I did do a couple of bug fixes today and a bit of reading up on a few things, nothing particularly note worthy though.

The developments I have done are basically ready for release. I will have to shut Pubs Galore down for half an hour to do this release as there are a number of database changes, I will test out all the changes again tomorrow, hopefully I will then be able do the proper release tomorrow, although this may slip to Friday.

Bugs Galore

Today I carried on chasing bugs out of the system, todays list:

• More picture fixes for the new pub activity screen, allowing older pictures to display.
• Fixed a weird one on the maps, if you move the map away from a pub so that no pubs are on the screen it tells you at the bottom how far the map centre is from the pub, at least that is what it is supposed to do (It does now).
• Put a warning on new pubs so that it is clear that they need to await approval, we have had a few complaints that this is not clear (and they are right).
• Closed pubs can be added (so that members can reminisce about some of the wonderful but now lost pubs), it wasn't clear when they were added that they were closed though, they now look closed in the same way as closed pubs in the main listings.
• The links on pubmaps to allow users to see all the changes that had been made to a map and also to correct the map point had been lost in the last release, I found them and put them back on the page
• When users made a map point correction we were not storing the fact that they made the submission just whether it was approved or rejected, we store this so that users can see how long we are taking to approve their work.
• Where a user added a new pub with pictures or web links their personal audit information was not storing the submission time, now fixed.
• Users looking at their audit log would see a time but no explanation where a link had been approved, now fixed.
• If we accidentally double clicked on the approve button for pictures it would audit as approved twice, now fixed.
• Web link auditing improved (not visible), some assumptions were made in our web link auditing, these are now removed.
• Improved the audit message relating to deleting comments and ratings, the old message dated back to when we were a contacts site and users marked themselves as regulars, this makes no sense with the current site.
  

And in my news review of the day, you can now hire an inflatable pub (they never had toys like that when I was a kid), and you can't call barmaids love anymore (not quite as dramatic as the Star thinks I feel, but news anyway I guess).

Down to just over a page of bugs to look at now, so hopefully a new site release soon and you can see the product of all this work.