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.

I’ve been having trouble finding a good location to fit the Google search box on Carsurvey.org. The recent changes to the site layout that I’ve made seem to be working well, but search volumes were down, which I have taken to be a bad sign.

In order to get more flexibility in terms of the placement of the search box, I’ve replaced the Google search box with a new search box, backended with some new search functionality I’ve written, based on MySQL Fulltext Search. This has advantages and disadvantages compared to using Google:

Disadvantages of the new solution:

• It doesn’t current show snippets of the matching text in the results
• There are no Google adverts, which were a small revenue stream for the site
• Parts of the site other than the reviews and comments are not searchable
• It can’t spot spelling errors
• There is no rich syntax like Google offers
• In order to increase performance, the search is limited to a max of 200 results. The search doesn’t compute the maximum number of results if there are more than 200. Interestingly, Google themselves only show about 1000 results, even when they find a lot more. For queries with thousands of results, Google state “about” how many they have found. So I doubt they are calculating that part of the result in real time

Advantages of the new solution:

• It’s fast. As long a query limit is in place stop it trying to return 20,000 results, MySQL Fulltext Search seems to fly. And there’s no need to do a DNS lookup for Google
• It’s complete and up-to-date – no need to wait for any spider to visit the site
• Comments that are found are linked to directly using an HTML anchor
• The new search looks specifically for model and manufacturer searches, and displays special results at the top of the page for these common cases
• More control over the look and feel of the search box and results
• No adverts

Just in case anyone misses the Google Search, I’ve placed a Google box at the bottom of the search results page. So you still have the choice to use Google if my new search is not delivering good results.

This change has allowed me to move the search box across to the left of the page. Hopefully it will be more obvious to visitors there.

While making this change, a few other minor issues were addressed. In particular, some margins have been changed from being in pixels to em units. This makes the site look nicer with large fonts.

As usual, any feedback is welcome.

I’ve just made small change to the formatting of the dates in the New Reviews and New Comments boxes on the left of most Carsurvey.org pages.

Rather than showing the date and time that the review or comment was posted, the code now works in terms of time difference between the post and the current time. For example, assuming now is 25th May 2006 00:00:

• “24th May 01:11” becomes “22 hours ago”
• “22nd May 22:26” becomes “2 days ago”

Dates older than 6 weeks, stay as dates, and lose the time.

Hopefully this will make the dates and times clearer, and will remove any potential confusion about time zones.

This time less dramatic…

Following on from these recent changes, I’ve made a few more tweaks.

• The left-hand navigation area has been widened from 250 to 270 pixels (was 336 pixels originally). To make this layout work on 800×600 screens, there’s a very tight pixel budget
• Some ads have been removed, and others are more clearly spaced from the navigation and content
• The car photos are back

I didn’t get any feedback on the recent changes, but I generally prefer the new layout. Hopefully the tweaks above will make the boundary between ads and navigation more clear, while maintaining the more efficient use of space of the new layout.