August 11th, 2008
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).
Posted in My Sites | 6 Comments »
July 24th, 2008
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.
Posted in My Sites | No Comments »
July 14th, 2008
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.
Posted in My Sites | No Comments »
July 10th, 2008
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.
Posted in My Sites | No Comments »
June 3rd, 2008
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.
Posted in My Sites | No Comments »
April 3rd, 2008
I’ve always been a fan of large monitors, and until recently my experience has always been that bigger is better.
I’ve had a Dell 2405FPW (24″) for several years now, and it’s a big improvement for me, even over the 20″ screen of my old iMac.
With the recent release of Dell’s new 3008WFP (more features than just about any monitor out there), I was recently tempted into upgrading to a 30″ monitor. 30″ monitors are still very expensive, but as someone who stares at his computer screen for about 10 hours a day, I’d be prepared to pay the premium, if I got a similar improvement to previous size increases.
Once the monitor arrived, I was simultaneously impressed with physical build quality, and disappointed with a couple of faults in my particular unit. Having had a couple of hours to test it out, the monitor is being returned for a refund, rather than a replacement; partly for the faults, but mostly because it’s not the improvement I hoped for. Key to this is the fact that the pixels are significantly smaller on the 30″ screen than a 24″ ( 100.63 pixels per inch vs 94.34 pixels per inch). That makes standard sized font somewhat uncomfortable to read. Use this helpful calculator to compute the pixels per inch for different screen sizes.
I do really like the extra screen pixels, but as most of my usage is text oriented (surfing, reading and coding), I can’t compromised on reading comfort.
Where a 30″ is better:
- Photos – they look gorgeous
- Google Earth – again, gorgeous
- HD video editing – didn’t try this, but the extra screen area allows for 1080p videos plus toolbars etc
- People with much better than average vision. My eyes are slightly better than 20:20 with glasses (confirmed by an optician two weeks ago). If you’re a fighter pilot, or a bird of prey, buy a 30″ screen. If you’ve got the vision for it, large spreadsheets and long documents will look much better
Where a 24″ is better (for those with normal vision):
- Anything text based – most user interfaces assume a certain size of text, and whilst you can usually up the font size, things rarely scale without compromise (buttons, graphics not scaling etc)
- Web development – Scaling up the fonts for readability usually distorts the layout of web pages to some degree, as images don’t normally scale. Whilst I do test the impact of larger fonts on my site, it seems like bad practice to develop at font sizes other than the browser default
- Gaming – Much more support for 1920×1200 than 2560×1600, and less strain on graphics cards too
It’s a pity there are no commonly used resolutions between 1920×1200, and 2560×1600. Something like 2160×1350 in a 27″ or 28″ screen would probably be perfect for me. Extra resolution, without having to squint, or pretend you’re in an IMAX cinema.
Alternatively, I need to wait for the world to move to resolution independent user interfaces, but that doesn’t look like it’s happening any time soon.
Posted in Gadgets | 1 Comment »
March 27th, 2008
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.
Posted in My Sites | No Comments »
February 8th, 2008
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.
Posted in My Sites | 5 Comments »
January 31st, 2008
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
Posted in My Sites | No Comments »
January 14th, 2008
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.
Posted in My Sites | 2 Comments »