I’ve just release a set of minor but linked changes to Carsurvey.org and related sites (motorcycle and mobile phone):
Just a heads up for regular visitors: As part of some changes that will lead to more RSS feeds, I’ve made some subtle changes to the code that generates the regional pages. I’ve tested it, and it all looks good, but given the size of the site, there may be some subtle errors that I’ve missed. If you spot anything, please let me know.
In order to make the main review feeds for all my sites work with Internet Explorer 7, I’ve changed the feeds from RSS 0.91 to RSS 1.0 (routing round an issue with the DTD in RSS 0.91). I’ve also reduced the number of items per feed to 15, to stay within the RSS 1.0 recommended limit.
Carsurvey.org, MotorcycleSurvey.com, and MobilePhoneSurvey.com now have links to their RSS feeds from their main New Reviews pages, as well as the RSS autodiscovery links that were already present.
Following a suggestion from a visitor, I’ve added RSS feeds for all reviews on Carsurvey.org, MotorcycleSurvey.com and MobilePhoneSurvey.com. They’re dynamically generated using PHP, so I’m crossing my fingers that over 80,000 new RSS feeds don’t bring my server to its knees.
As a bit of insurance, I’ve padded the ID part of the URL out to a fixed width, to make converting the dynamic feeds to a static directory tree easier. That’s my backup plan if server load is a problem. Ultimately even that might not be enough, but I’m going to be optimistic and see what happens.
Whilst implementing this, I was pleasantly surprised to discover Feed Icons. It’s great that there’s a standard icon set to use for displaying feeds, which is free to use. The icons have been liberally sprinkled around my sites.
Less than 12 hours after coming up with the idea, I’m happy to launch CarFilter.co.uk (link now removed)
It’s a simple site for searching UK car reviews, based on Google’s new Custom Search Engine
Inspired by the review Matt Cutts wrote, I spent some time writing lots of URL patterns that would filter only the review pages of most major UK car sites. I’m pretty happy with the result, which I think gives nicer results than just a plain “model manufacturer reviews” search on Google UK
On the comments pages, the reviews now have their dates and times displayed in the same format as the comments. This is in response to a visitor request, and makes things more consistent across those pages.
The review summary and “Add new comment” page elements have been enlarged to make them more visible.
As usual, these changes have also been made to the Mobile Phone and Motorcycle sites.
Over the weekend I followed a link to a post about IE7 coming this month. To make sure I had no issues with IE7 compatibility, I downloaded the RC1 build, and had a good look round my sites for any rendering problems.
Things were pretty good, but it did seem that the Easy Clearing technique I was using wasn’t working with IE7, resulting in the search box and tabbed navigation floating being detached from the navigation bar below.
A little searching produced this fix, which is also now reflected in the original Easy Clearing page. Basically I changed the old display:inline-table to display:inline-block, and IE7 came into line. This change has now been made to all my live sites.
Thanks to all the research done by various CSS experts, Carsurvey.org and related sites now display properly on IE7, as well as the other browsers I actively try to support – IE5 & IE6 on Windows, and the latest versions of Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
A couple of weeks ago I added the facility for members to change their passwords (in response to a request from a member). I’ve now also added the facility to logout from the Members Area, which will remove the cookie used to keep members logged in from their computer (this was also by request).
This won’t be of much interest to most people, but I’ve released some new code that should improve the page titles and meta tags on the Car, Motorcycle and Mobile Phone sites.
For example, pages such as the search results and deletion requests pages are now marked as NOINDEX, so they shouldn’t pointlessly clutter up the search results of external search engines.
I’m also providing more relevant information in the meta description tags where appropriate.
Hopefully these improvements will result in more accurate external search results, and ultimately more visitors to my sites.
Right, the server is back, but the main reviews table wouldn’t mount back on the database. Thankfully, the “repair table” command from MySQL has fixed the problem and we don’t seem to have lost anything.
I’m going to spend some time checking over the site now. If anyone spots any problems, especially corrupt reviews or comments, please let me know.
I’ll be sending a complaint into my hosting company, as I’m not happy at all about how this has been handled. I’m willing to allow for some problems, but taking about five hours instead of one, getting the day of the change wrong, and corrupting the database are not acceptable. It’s a real shame, as I’ve been very happy with them up to now.