Not a big deal for most people, but Carsurvey.org, and the Mobile Phone and Motorcycle sites, have had changes made regarding error pages.

Rather boring I know, but basically I’ve cleaned up a lot of internal error pages, and replaced them with proper 404 pages. This is to make sure that any error pages don’t get mistaken by search engines or people as real pages.

I’ve done quite a bit of testing, but if anyone spots any errors (regardless of whether you think they may be related to this change), I’d appreciate it if you could let me know.

I’ve made some subtle CSS changes to the top left search box on Carsurvey.org. The text input box is now a pale yellow (rather than white), the Search button itself is bold, and the text size is a little larger. This should make the important search functionality easier to find on the page.

I’m planning to roll similar changes out to the Motorcycle and Mobile Phone sites tomorrow.

The Motorcycle and Mobile Phone sites are now back in sync with Carsurvey.org.

This means lots of subtle changes such as:

• Narrower navigation, so more space is available for content
• More sensible date formats
• Improved search functionality
• More straightforward CSS

As I’m pretty happy with the most recent changes to the Carsurvey.org layout, I’ve taken the opportunity to simplify the CSS used on the site.

In particular, I’ve banished negative margins. They’re very powerful, but I’ve never felt very comfortable with them.

The site now renders a little less well in Internet Explorer 5 (IE5), but it’s still perfectly usable (just a few minor alignment issues). IE5 market share is falling steadily, so while I intend to make sure the site continues to work well in IE5 (it’s about 2% for my sites now), I’m not going to resort to scary pieces of CSS to make everything pixel perfect.

IE6 (73%), Firefox (18%), Safari (3%) and Opera (1%) will continue to be the focus of my attention, with some IE7 testing in the near future.

Following on from the Improved Carsurvey.org Search, I’ve now ported this functionality to the airline reviews site.

The old Google search solution used by the other sites wasn’t an option for the airline site (as it sits within the Carsurvey.org domain, rather than under its own domain name), but this new searching system doesn’t have such constraints, so at long last, the airline site is now properly searchable.

Apologies to anyone getting sick of these…

I haven’t had any feedback on the other changes made recently, and the figures are ambiguous, so I’ve made a change to the reviews pages only, in an attempt to find an optimal layout.

I’ve restored the similar reviews box, and altered the advertising placement slightly.

I’ve spent some more time working on the new search functionality:

• Keywords in results are now highlighted as bold text
• Matching fragments of reviews and comments are shown, rather than just the review summary text
• Less results per page are shown, as each result tends to be larger due to the above changes
• I’ve decreased the maximum limit of results from 200 to 100. This is to counteract the increased work load generated by matching the keywords and fragments

Much as I’m very impressed with MySQL Fulltext Searching, it doesn’t offer the facility (at least in Version 4) to extract the matching text from results sets. I’ve had to do it myself in PHP using regular expressions. Not a big deal, but it did feel a little like I was having to reinvent the wheel.

Not feeling too well at the moment (Hay Fever), so have spent the afternoon making a series of simple changes, mostly to make things more consistent across the site:

• The new reviews and comments pages now use the new date formatting (minutes, hours, days, or weeks ago), rather than showing the database datetime stamp (which was pretty meaningless)
• The various geographic new reviews and comments pages, along with the pages that display reviews by type, or comments by volume, have been changed to the full width layout currently used on the reviews and comments pages. This should make better use of the available space. The global new reviews and comments pages are unchanged
• I’ve disabled the descriptive text that was present for some models. It hasn’t been updated for ages, and Wikipedia does a better job of documenting car model histories than I ever could. Better to not do something than do it badly.