Each town and each venue now has nearby train stations listed. Sometime in the future I hope to expand this functionality so that a popup directions guide to the station can be displayed. I’ll see how the site’s users appreciate the current information first though.

As suggested in my blog just before new years I was keen to get lists of nearby places published for various places in the directory so people could look for supermarkets after going to the cinema etc. This is now up and running for about half the directory. Similarly I’m now adding nearby ATMs cash […]

Just a quick update. Working on 2 new ideas. 1) Working on extending the website to include pages on amenities close to other amenities. So all banks in the vicinity of a certain supermarket listed in the directory, or all restaurants next to a certain pub. Im starting to get precise locations for all the […]

Phase 2 has been a big success. The easier site navigation is paying dividends in the form of more search engine referred visits and I think the general user experience has been much improved. I added banks into the mix the other day which had been something on my to do list for a few […]

Search function now complete! Works well. Nice and simple. I might look to add further “wider search” functionality in the future. For example if you search for “akbar’s” – a great Indian restaurant in Leeds the search won’t return anything as the correct result does not have an apostrophe. Small stuff but room for improvement. […]

Over the course of the last few days I’ve managed to knock the URL duplication issue on its head. I didn’t actually go with the numbered amenity solution (e.g. tesco(2)-birmingham), I actually created a script that made sure the street address for any amenity within a larger area (the town or city) was unique for […]

Well bulk of phase 2 update is done. It actually went pretty smoothly I think. The things that I thought would take hours took minutes but unfortunately the things that I thought would take minutes tooks hours. Anyway, what is now in existence looks and seems to work OK. Main index page is now drawing […]

Mmm. So custom error pages made me think. (I just put them online by the way). My site doesnt have any included headers or footers. I don’t really envisage the base pages expanding much from here, (In fact by the end of phase 2 their number might well have contracted) but if I want to […]

Around Easter last year I wrote down about 20 different ideas I’d had for a while for new websites and also addons/upgrades to the ones I already manage. My first project was scheduled to take around 2 weeks. It ended up taking 4 months. This was my long overdue upgrade to my Phishing Scams website […]

So this is a first for me. Having worked with the internet for 15 years now I have never once written down my thoughts on web development in a blog. I did actually run and write a news service on a financial website I ran a few years ago and actually come to think of […]