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.

I’ve just made a small change to motorcyclesurvey.com, to see if applying a CSS max-width to large block of text content improves the visitor experience, by keeping the line lengths from becoming too long.

Internet Explorer 5 & 6 users won’t see the change (max-width isn’t supported in those browsers), and nor will most users of small monitors, but hopefully restricting the text content to a width of 33ems (ems being used so the max-width scales with font size), with auto left and right margins, will make the reading experience more pleasant for visitors.

As usual, if this change seems to be positive, I’ll roll out the change to the car and mobile phone sites.

As an aside, for tracking the effect of small changes like these, I’m finding the Google Analytics Pages/Visit figures very useful.

The more reviews links I implemented just over a month ago seem to be working well (visitors are viewing more pages per visit).

In light of this, I’ve just added additional links of this type, to other pages on Carsurvey.org and related sites.

Breadcrumbs alone don’t seem to be enough for visitors who are new to a site, as they’re easily scrolled off the top of the page.

As promised in my Simplified pages for adding comments post, I’ve now made a similar set of changes to process for adding a new review. The number of pages has fallen from 6 to 4, which will hopefully result in more reviews being added to the site.

For a long time, I’ve played with the idea of switching off ads for Carsurvey.org members. How Ads Really Work: Superfans and Noobs helped persuade me that it really was the right thing to do.

With immediate effect, anyone who has recently visited the Members Area of Carsurvey.org (the car site, not the airline site), will be able to view the main car site with almost all the ads removed. The members cookie lasts for 31 days. If you login to the Members Area at least once per month, the ads will stay removed, regardless of how many reviews or comments you rate.

The only exception to the ad removal is the UK used car search facility, which is doesn’t take up much screen real estate, and is subject to an agreement that I don’t want to break.