Distant Parts

As Google now supports microformats, I’ve added hReview support to all the CSDO Media sites, including Carsurvey.org and the airline review pages. Whilst visitors with normal web browsers won’t notice any changes, the reviews are now much easier for computers and search engines to understand and manipulate.

In case anyone else is looking to do something similar, I found the Optimus microformats transformer to be very useful for checking that my hReview markup was valid.

Questions, complaints about Carsurvey.org? Ask away in the comments.

Following a recent experiment with FeedbackArmy, I’ve removed the tabs on Carsurvey.org. They seemed like a good idea when I introduced them, but ultimately they were just confusing and a waste of space.

As a consequence, the links to the other CSDO Media sites have been moved into the page footer, and the search box has moved from the top left of the page to the top right.

I’ve also added the IE8 meta tag, to make sure Carsurvey.org behaves nicely when Microsoft release their latest browser in a few months time.

Carsurvey.org now autosaves draft comments and reviews every 30 seconds, as long as JavaScript and cookies are enabled in a visitor’s browser. This is similar to the autosave features in WordPress or Gmail.

For most visitors, this means:

• If your browser crashes and you return to the site, your in progress review or comment will be automatically recovered for you
• If you’re writing a long review or comment, you don’t have to do it all in one session, as drafts are stored for 7 days

Getting this feature working across browsers was made much easier by the wonderful jQuery JavaScript library; I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Following a suggestion from a regular user of the Members Area, I’ve added two optional features, which can be activated using the “Update your details” page in the Members Area:

• Show full review details, including numerical ratings? – This changes the default presentation of reviews in the Members Area to a more detailed view, with all the review details displayed, rather than the default cut down details that are usually shown.
• Post text feedback to the site moderator? – Enabling this option allows for members to post feedback or concerns about particular reviews and comments, which will be read by the site moderator (that’s me – steven@carsurvey.org).

The 2 pixel thick black borders are now only 1 pixel thick. Hopefully this will make Carsurvey.org rather easier on the eye, as the old thicker borders tended to distract from the actual page content.

I may experiment with lightening the borders further (grey rather than black) if this change is well received. No plans for curved corners or gradients though, just in case anyone thinks Carsurvey.org is arriving late to the Web 2.0 style party.

Almost two years ago I launched a little experimental site called CarFilter.co.uk, which was a Google Custom Search Engine for UK car reviews.

It never really got any traction, so I’ve taken the decision to close it down.

In an attempt to make finding high quality reviews easier, I’ve added a new navigation feature to most of the reviews on Carsurvey.org.

Where there’s at least three reviews for a particular car model, the old “All XXX YYY reviews” link is supplemented by two Recommended Reviews at the foot of the main review text. These reviews are chosen based on the following:

• Long reviews are favoured over short reviews. This is based on the review word counts
• Reviews must have summary text available
• If there are lots of reviews from the same geographic region, those will be favoured over other regions. Read a UK and Ireland review, and more UK and Ireland reviews will probably be recommended.
• How close the year of manufacture is to the current review; closer is better
• If there are lots of reviews for the current year, the old “All XXX YYY reviews” link is replaced by a year specific link. For example, “All Ford Focus reviews” may become “All 2001 Ford Focus reviews”.

Also, there’s a predictable order in the recommended reviews, so it can be used as a next/previous system for reading recommended reviews.

As usual, this has also been rolled out to the motorcycle and mobile phone sites, and any feedback would be much appreciated.

Following a request from a regular visitor, I’ve just released an update to Carsurvey.org (and related sites), which displays flag icons in various lists of reviews.

The flags are pretty small, but that’s so they’re not overly distracting on a text-centric site. Related to this, the happy and sad faces have been deemphasized, to allow the consistent placement of the icons.

The Reviews by Regions feature is still available for visitors who want to only see reviews from a specific region.

Thanks to Mark James for the excellent free flag icon set that I’ve used.

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.