So where is it then?

Well I know I promised we would be rolling the new design out, but nothing new has appeared with it. I am working on it in my spare time but it is proving to be a devil.

The next page we want to roll out is the country (England, Wales, Scotland, & N. Ireland) page, and with it a new town page. We have it in mind that we are going to do away with the very nice pictures of the UK that we are currently using as they are also constraining us. I have been trying to replace them with some Google Maps trickery. It has, to be honest, been stumbling from one problem to another. The first problem is even finding border information for the UK borders, you would think that this would just be general information that any old soul could have, after all these borders are defined by someone somewhere in the Government, you would think they would like us to get them correct. As far as I can tell the only way to actually get true border information is to pay exorbitant amounts to OS, an organisation originally set up by the Government. Without wishing to get political I find it a little disturbing that my taxes don't stretch to allowing me to get a proper description of county borders in my country.

Anyway having found some nice border definitions I have gone ahead and used them, sadly they were a little too detailed, and I have no experience of vector smoothing so have had all sorts of issues trying to make the borders a little smoother. My initial pass at all this was taking something like 5-6 minutes for our server to process the England page of the site, which really wasn't going to work. Anyway got it down to 2 seconds to do all the operations, and then in a final pass down to 0.2 secs (still a little slow for a page on a server, but I will live with that). So anyway we then come to the browser. It takes the browser about 60 secs to display the page in the initial version and again after some mild optimisation got it down to about 20 secs and now down to closer to 5. I should give Google their credit here, their new browser Chrome was handling it with no problems where the other browsers were dragging their feet, that said I don't advise anyone to use it as it is just another annoyance having another browser to try and support.

Anyway I think that is more detail than anyone needed, but we are still working on various aspects of the site, just as ever it is more complicated than I wanted. Hopefully I will soon have the county pages sorted and can then move on to town pages using the ceremonial counties rather than 1980's postal counties we are currently using.

Having mentioned browsers, if you are using IE7 and haven't upgraded to IE8 it is an improvement and worth doing (or you could just upgrade to Firefox). IE8 should offer more security and it is definitely faster at coping with Javascript than the old IE7.