Monday, July 13, 2009
SPOT maps, and now wider...
I have a couple of changes to the site to report.
First, there's an updated SPOT page. Originally, I used rewrites to redirect tcfjr.goption.com/spot to my findmespot.com page — which isn't the best idea, privacy-wise. Next, I redirected to my current trip page on Jason Jonas' site. Better, but it still meant I had to ssh into my shell account to update the redirect url whenever I started a new trip.
Here's the new setup: all trips get an entry in the main blog, with a small iframe of that trip's STM map. But, the latest trip gets its own page with a larger map. Whenever I add a blog entry for a new trip, the tcfjr.goption.com/spot page gets rebuilt to show that trip.
I played with a few different ways of doing this, and this came out the best, by quite a margin. (I really didn't want to start a separate MT blog to hold the SPOT info.) One side-effect of this change is that an entry's keyword field is no longer embedded in the URL/filename of that entry; I use the keyword field to store the iframe reference for the larger map size, and it just didn't work to embed all that junk into a file name or URL.
I also added a SPOT entry to the banner, for easy access to the larger map page.
Secondly: the width of the main content section on each page is now 100 pixels wider. The old width was great back in the day when lots of people ran at 800x600, but thankfully those days are gone for good. The new width should make it easier to post photos and east-west-style maps.
I tried making it even wider, but it became too wide to read comfortably. I hope the new width is a good compromise — wide enough, but not too wide.
Posted by bnc at July 13, 2009 3:18 PM