Distant Parts

I’ve recently been busy with lots on unglamorous infrastructure work (if you’ve ever heard of Unicode, you’ll feel my pain), but in a spare hour I found the time to make a small improvement to the Airline Flight Reviews site.

Previously the front page used to show the 100 or so airlines with the most reviews.

Now the page shows the airlines (around 75) with the most reviews of flights from the last few years.

So many of the once popular airlines (GO for example) that no longer exist have been banished from the front page, and some newer airlines (such as Silverjet) have taken their place.

Hopefully this will make it easier to find recent reviews for popular airlines.

For anyone who’s interested, the Google AdSense Blog has recently added an article featuring Carsurvey.org. There’s a bit of site history in there, as well as various suggestions for optimising the performance of Google AdSense placements.

After spending far more time than I originally intended, I’ve just released improved search functionality to Carsurvey.org.

New features include:

• Phrase searching (via double or single quotes)
• Engine sizes can now be found, and the system understands that 1.6 and 1.6L (and similar variations) are searches for the same thing
• For reviews: results in key fields, such as manufacturer, model, and engine are now weighted above results in the faults and general comments text. This gives more relevant results for most searches
• Review results are weighted towards the longer reviews

Carsurvey.org now displays the engine details in the lists of reviews on the site. Sounds like a trivial change (and it was in terms of the coding required), but in a classic case of why you should eat your own dog food, I was struggling to find reviews of a 1.6 Vauxhall Zafira on my own website (someone I know bought one recently).

It’s rare that you get to view a site that you work on every day, through the eyes of a normal user, so not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, I’ve made some changes to the layout of the pages that list the reviews by model.

I much prefer the new layout (I tested quite a few alternatives), and hopefully regular visitors will like it too.

I’ve just release an update to Carsurvey.org, which displays average review scores for different model, region and year combinations. See the Ford Focus Statistics for an example, and note the warning about not reading too much into these statistics.

A few people have asked me for a similar feature over the years, and if it gets a lot of use, I’ll spend more time on improving it.

To clarify things for those who are interested, the averages displayed are arithmetic means. Whilst writing this feature, I experimented with more statistical language, and other statistical measures, but came to the conclusion that it was best to keep things simple.

The statistics pages are also being used to test a new URL structure.

Compare:

http://www.carsurvey.org/by-region/uk+and+ireland/ford/focus/statistics/

to an old style

http://www.carsurvey.org/countrymodelyear
_UK+and+Ireland_Ford_Focus_2004.html

Forced lower case, slashes instead of underscores, much easier to guess URLs, and all content from a particular region in its own subdirectory.

In case I forget, these changes also apply to the motorcycle and mobile phone sites.

The airline site has just received a set of minor updates:

• Tweaks to the page width and layout, to make things work better on 800×600 displays
• New page footer with  explicit copyright, advertising and privacy policy links

A full rewrite of the Airline site (probably under its own domain) is on my todo list, but I don’t have any timescales for that right now.

As the removal of filtering by review quality has become a permanent change, I’ve just disabled the ability to vote on the quality of reviews. The votes could no longer significantly affect the structure of the site, so facility has been removed for the foreseeable future. Apologies for not getting round to making this change sooner (I was preoccupied with the recent server move).

Voting in the members area, and to indicate whether comments are on-topic, are still available.

Now the move is pretty much complete, I’ve got a few more details of the move for anyone who’s interested.

Carsurvey.org has been hosted with the same company for about 4 years. They were originally known as Ev1Servers, but were acquired by The Planet, and in my experience, service proceeded to go downhill from that point.

Support used to be good, but a RAID problem and a recent server stability issue were both handled badly, and I decided it was time to move Carsurvey.org to pastures new.

After lots of research, I settled on SoftLayer, who seem to be picking up a lot of disgruntled The Planet customers.

Initial reasons for choosing SoftLayer:

• Pretty good feedback on forums such as WebHostingTalk
• Large choice of operating systems, including RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.0 (the old server was running version 4.0, and I wanted to move to the newer version, complete with PHP5 and MySQL 5
• Huge flexibility in hardware configuration
• Quad core Xenon processors - these are hugely powerful for the money. The new server has a single quad core Xeon at 2.4Ghz (Kentsfield, Core 2), compared to the old server, which had two single core 2.4Ghz Xeons (the old NetBurst type)
• Almost any RAID configuration you could reasonably want
• Very competitive pricing. For the new server, which has a quad core processor, 2Gb of RAM, and 3x 150Gb Raptor SATA disks in a hot-swappable RAID 5 array, it’s costing $279 a month (including various other sundry options). That compares very well to the $348 a month I was paying for the old server at The Planet, which only had two disks (in a mirror; not hot-swappable), and two single core processors
• Support forums available. I’m always suspicious of companies that don’t dare have support forums

Observations following the move:

• The Planet have been getting more and more aggressive with their marketing emails (they should do something about their support instead). Thankfully SoftLayer don’t seem to be bothering me in the same way
• I had need of SoftLayer’s support when I first got the new server. It was OK. Quick response times (unlike The Planet), and reasonable responses, although they took a few attempts to fix an admittedly obscure hardware issue. There’s room for improvement, but SoftLayer were much better than my recent experiences with The Planet
• The new SoftLayer server has far more sophisticated management facilities than my old The Planet server, including backend VPN access, and full control over an IPMI card, which allows for easy monitoring of the hardware, and KVM console access (useful if you make a mistake while securing your network connections). These new facilities took some time to learn, but the extra security and control were worth the effort
• I do miss the live text chat with support that The Planet offered. The Planet’s solution was badly implemented, but it’s often easier to use text chat support, than explain things over the telephone. It would be good if SoftLayer could offer this facility

In conclusion, so far I’m pretty happy with SoftLayer. Carsurvey.org is running on a more powerful and configurable server, with reasonable support, for less money than I was paying at The Planet.

Carsurvey.org and related sites are currently in the process of being moved to a new and better web server.

While this move is in progress, some of the features of the site may not be available, such as adding new reviews and comments, and the members area. Once I’ve switched everything across, it may take up to 24 hours for your browser to start using the new server instead of the old one.

Apologies to everyone for the inconvenience. More details on move to come in a future post (once I’m happy  the move has been completed successfully).

I’ve just made the decision to increase the maximum queue lengths in the Carsurvey.org Members Area. The reviews queue can now hold 75 reviews (up from 50), and the comments queue can now hold 250 comments (up from 150).

Carsurvey.org is really busy at the moment, which is fantastic news, but it’s making enormous demands on my time. Normally the Members Area can cope with approving most of the reviews and comments, but the Members Area activity is low at the moment (probably because it’s Summer), and I’m having to personally cover the gap between what the Members can do, and the large number of comments and reviews currently being submitted.

In order to stop things blocking up, and to allow me to sleep, and fulfill a few personal obligations (basically a Perfect Storm of social events), I’ve increased the queue lengths, so the site can manage about 2 days with only minimal attention, without having to block the addition of new reviews and comments.

I still aim to get most reviews and comments approved within 24 hours, but occasionally (this coming weekend for example), it may have to slip to 48 hours, as there’s only so much I can do in snatched moments with my N800.

Apologies for this, and hopefully it will be a very infrequent occurrence.