I haven’t really left the house much this weekend, not wanting to multiply the evil effect pollen has had on me this year. That said, I probably would have risked leaving the house for a 25th anniversary sale at Safeway in Vancouver. Plus it seemed like time to move the April Fool’s gag out of the top position.
So you get updates. You’re welcome.
Page layouts:
After almost a year, I have finally finished my project to re-format all the location lists on the site (which took longer than I planned). For the past ten-plus years, these pages were generated with a Google spreadsheet in an IFRAME. This simplified lots of things for me but also had some negatives. To start, it was absolutely horrible on mobile devices. Also, since the sheets were externally hosted by Google, none of the data showed up when you searched this site. Both of those problems are now solved. And for those of you who would rather see the lists in tabular format (which really is the best way unless you’re on a phone) you can still view them in Google Sheets, as a CSV, or as a PDF.
If you’re interested in geeking out and learning how I (sort of) automated this using OpenRefine, let me know!
Search options:
Another thing I started on quite a while back was adding a function to search both the main site and the message board simultaneously. This is harder than it sounds; these are two different platforms (WordPress and phpBB) using two different databases. There are plugins and paid options to cross-search, but I’m cheap (and don’t receive any compensation from the sites) so I opted for a Google-based option that I had used before. I finally have them reasonably well implemented on both sites. I have not (yet) replaced the traditional search functions on either; the Google option is an additional search box while I’m still testing and tweaking. Let me know how it works for you!
Latest updates:
Since March: