Distant Parts

The server the site is hosted on is having filesystem problems, and someone is looking at right now.  I’ve got a good full backup (I know it restores OK) from Monday, and managed to save some of the newer reviews first thing this morning, but I’m not hopeful about some of the very recent reviews and comments. I think I’m going to spending the rest of the day rebuilding things once whatever hardware failed is replaced.

Hopefully all will be back to normal later (probably much later) today.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Since it was created back in 1997, Carsurvey.org has organised reviews by the year of manufacture of the cars. This made sense for European cars, but not for North American cars, where model year is what matters. The site eventually started collecting model year information, but the site structure did not change, as it was difficult to come up with a consistent structure that would make sense on both sides of the Atlantic.

I’ve been aware for years that North American visitors were confused by the site structure, and I eventually came to the conclusion that it was better for the meaning of a year on Carsurvey.org to be inconsistent, depending on the region of the review.

For a North American review, the model year (where available) is used in preference to the year of manufacture. This isn’t the case for the rest of the world.

So a list of 2006 BMW 3 Series reviews will contain 2006 model year reviews from North America, and 2006 manufacture year reviews from elsewhere. Not quite the same thing, but for reviews from their own region, it should fit visitor’s assumptions, rather than trying to make them fit the site’s data model.

MotorcycleSurvey.com has also had similar changes made, but in that case, model year always takes priority over year of manufacture, regardless of region, as that reflects the way motorcycles are marketed.

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.