Bugfixes and tweaks
- Guestbook configuration doesn't fail, so the link from the home-page
works
- POI info works even when the map isn't displayed (the lat/lng was only
being provided for maps, because until yesterday, POI display used X/Y instead)
- When there are no sub-menus in POIs, a header (with icon if available) is
displayed to explain what you are seeing
- The gazetteer main screen doesn't load unnecessary Javascripts
- I've improved the build process for POIs to only rebuild when necessary
(building the tree is painful)
- Sort for place name suggestor puts shorter forms first (locks etc still
sorted alphabetically rather than arithmetically)
- Credits in POI work better
I'm aware that the backlog of new places is growing. I'll have a good bash
at them sometime soon.
This is a particularly messy upgrade, where I've changed several internal
data structures and names of files - please be enthusiastic in reporting any
odditries or outright bugs you see as a result
RSS feeds, icons, POI improvements, others
The new gazetteer is mature enough that I'm now going to report changes to
it here
- Tags are now sorted in decreasing order of specificity - this is less
confusing, and makes the safest suggestion when a new link-by-tag is
added - good thinking Steve
- "Find Nearest" works for things with more than one space in them (like
"Fish and Chips")
- A workaround for a caching problem on the POI structure has been
added
- The buttons to change a position are only there when they should be, not
when looking at a place that someone else has already suggested moving
- There is a new "reset map" button that restores the original view even if
you've scrolled miles away using a POI
And there is a lot of other stuff as well
- I've stopped convoluted spam strings from breaking moderation (if they'd
got past they'd have been OK!)
- all Javascripts are now compressed
- The main menu has icons - a bit of fun, but rather pretty
- The anti-guestbook-comment-spam technique has been improved
- There are RSS feeds for news, photos and guestbook entries - in the future
they'll be available for comments and for the moderators as well
- POI stuff has been extensively reworked to use a new database and tree
structure. See an article coming to the blog soon for more on this
- Machine specific "smart"-quotes and other silly characters in pasted
comments no longer blow up the XML
- Starting a "furthest place" on an excluded waterway now reports what has
gone wrong
Tweaks, feedback for gazetteer, more POI
A few tweaks, including a feedback link on the new gazetteer, and another
huge bunch of POIs
Efficiency changes, gazetteer/POI stuff
- Tags now build a lot quicker (only really of interest to me)
- A bug that made some "find nearest" fail has been fixed
- The index files for find nearest have been rationalised for
efficiency
- You can now chose the range within which you want to see POIs
- The new gazetteer is further enhanced, again see the "to-do list" for detaukls
Patch for tags
A patch to fix errors when adding links through tags that referred to more
than one page
Patch for Tags. Browser compatibility work
- Tags now include structures (tunnels, aqueducts, lock flights)
- Lots of Javascript tweaks made to suit other browsers
Release 8.17.17.1 - 3 Feb 2007
- Fixed a bug in guestbook moderation
- Fixed - I hope - a bug for old users of the new guestbook
- Added a lot more POI
- Collected POI statistics and put them on the home page (now 15,500)
Release 8.17.17 - 3 Feb 2007
- Fixed a bug where tracking information was upsetting the guestbook
moderation
- Fixed a major and longstanding bug where any attempt to use the gazetteer
to select the second place in "move photo" confused everything horribly
- Equals signs in cgi parameter values were being dropped (an ancient bug
dataing back to at least 2001). This broke references to urls that themselves
contained parameters
- The drop-down place suggester has been recoded to show initial matches and
then internal ones
- Lots more in the new gazetteer
menu - see the todo list there. As the blog suggests, this will be
becoming the default very soon
- Added more POIs - all supermarkets
Release 8.17.16.6 - 20 Jan 2007
A couple of little tweaks, but the main thing is that there are a lot of
new places in the database
Release 8.17.16.5 - 8 Jan 2007
Some nice enhancements to the new gazetteer
menu - see the todo list for
infomation. Notice how it still seems to be getting longer!
Release 8.17.16.4 - 30 December 2006
Fixed a bug where changes to the interpreter to facilitate the new "find
nearest" feature for the new gazetteer had broken the "ring starting off the
ring" feature (there really is a connexion, but it's too much to go into here).
Release 8.17.16.3 - 30 December 2006
- Quite a pile of pending new places added - bringing the place total from
6968 to 7023
- Some new statistics for those checking coordinates
Release 8.17.16.2 - 20 December 2006
Just some more tweaks to the new gazetteer
menu - see the todo list for
infomation. Notice how it is getting longer despite me fixing stuff!
Release 8.17.16.1 - 20 December 2006
Just some tweaks to the new gazetteer
- Select boxes in options are slightly wider, so they don't do silly things
when "information" is moved across
- See the "to do" list on the new gazetteer
menu for details of all the others
Release 8.17.16 - 17 December 2006
A huge amount more on the new gazetter - hence the increasing level 3
version number. When I go live it will be as 8.18, whatever the size of the
actual changes
- Options - very neat options, and allow more configation than anyone
could want.
- Maps - still pretty basic
- You can check what is still to be done on the to-do list; as you see, I'm
still a bit off making this the default version!
Release 8.17.15 - 16 December 2006
- More characters escaped in photo text, preventing them failing on reading
(as was happening with pound signs)
- The new gazetteer now displays photos in tabs - it's getting closer to
full functionality
- When the shortened "what's new" page is made, links are tweaked so that
they still work
- Dates on latest contributions fixed (done as a patch)
- A message about the October users database corruption has been added
- When you register to add photos you don't get a blank screen any more
Release 8.17.14.2 - 10 December 2006
A parcel of patches to the experimental new gazetteer
- Selector now works with Opera - so I suspect IE as well
- POI tabs now work with Opera - so ditto
- There is a "close" option on the "add link" pop-up
- Typing single match names into the search box now provides gazetteer
rather than a message
- Category names in the POI tabs are capitalised
- The new POI data has been increased
The Waterways Petition link has been restored
Release 8.17.14.1 - 9 December 2006
The new index page did look a lot better and so, to celebrate CanalplanAC's
6th birthday on 21 November 2006, I made it the live one
In prototype only there is an entirely new gazetteer page. Not only is this
newly designed - it looks better, is more structured, and shows more on the
screen at any one time - but it also supports several brand new features
discussed on the blog. If you feel like testing it, it's here
Release 8.17.14 - 19 November 2006
Lots of development on new POI stuff, a redesigned gazetteer etc, but none
of it is live. The only stuff anyone should see is:
- Some minor edits and corrections to the place data (keep them coming
people)
- The bug reporting address changed, as the spammers found it
- There is an experimental new index
page for people to test - something like this could become the main
one
Release 8.17.13 - 4 November 2006
There is some interesting new code that will support a complete redesign of
the way places of interest are handled - I'm calling it the new
POI-subsystem. None of it is properly live in this version but it is getting a bit of
a work out just by being there
- Put some anti-spammer stuff (including a tarpit) into gazetteer
- Made [tab] work better with autocomplete (it doesn't put the selected item
in, instead it clears the list)
- If you put a '+' into a place name it would get through the verification
stage and cause route planning to fail
- Two more misrouting hiccups (alternative routes with particular options)
fixed
Release 8.17.12 - 1 October 2006
- I've done a lot on links - see the following blog entries for the gory details
- While I was playing around with coordinates, distances, pedometers etc, I
finally got down to sorting out Stourport, which has been something of a
kludge ever since it was cobbled in on 29 November 2000
- I've improved the Ashton Canal
- If you chose not to have links to the gazetteer, you didn't get the names
of waterways in the route list! Now you do.
- I've made several changes to the way place and link data are read into the
processing engine to aid with making moderated changes to places easier
Release 8.17.11.2 - 16 September 2006
- Fixed a bug where the Avon ring was routing up the Droitwich [credit Ed
Stewart]
- Fixed a bug where the wrong turning instructions were being given at
Napton Junction [credit Ray and Barbara Watkins]
- Lots of stuff to automate adding updates from the virtual lengthsman. All
very experimental and no doubt fragile
Release 8.17.11.1 - 3 September 2006
Some patches to the lengthsman code; fixed a bug with photo info; uploaded
the coordinate changes I'd made while testing lengthsman
Experimental "lengthsman" feature
I'm doing a lot of work on the "virtual lengthsman" feature. It's far
from finished, but if you fancy a go you'll find it here
- Some small patches to the autocomplete code:
- it now works in the first box on the input page without you having to move
out and back
- it doesn't cause stylesheet errors
- it doesn't flash larger when you scroll it up and down
- Some things vanished from the gazetteer page in the last release, now restored
- Lots of new places added, including ones that had fallen down the plusnet
mail blackhole in July - I rescued them from the server - making a total of 34
more - only 66 more for 7000
Release 8.17.10 - 31 August 2006
- In fact, I completely buggered the home page for IE users last time - I
had to do an emergency remote fix to it. I do hope that this version is still
fine
- Another "new place" bug in the placefinder has been fixed
- I've added autocomplete to the entry boxes in the gazetteer and the main
entry page
Release 8.17.9 - 28 August 2006
- I've altered the autocomplete for "quick search" to make it work in both words of a
comma separated route
- I've compressed all the Javascript files (and written make rules to make
sure this happens automatically from now on) - this should save some
bandwidth
- I've documented the sources for this on the copyrights page
- I've improved the layout rules for the new index page, so it is less
likely to stick the menu bar down at the bottom. I'm still not entirely happy
with the layout. If there are any HTML experts out there who'd like to take
the existing page source and hack it into something more elegant I'd love to
hear from them - I could then easily reverse it back to the automatically
generated one
- As no one has complained yet, I've added the new autocomplete to the main
gazetteer start page - it will slowly spread through the site
Release 8.17.8 - 27 August 2006
Yesterday I accidentally released a redesigned index page to the world.
The aim was to put this up as a prototype and let a few people try it. Ah
well, it seems to work well enough. This formal release improves the
formatting slightly - in particular the borders between columns.
The "quick search" index box at the side is prototyping an AJAX based
database searcher for place names. Give it a go (it doesn't kick in until you
have typed three characters - experiments showed that was about right). If
this works and is popular I'm going to extend it to the main input screen and
the gazetteer - so please let me know what you think of it (by email from the home page)
Release 8.17.7.3 - 22 August 2006
Release 8.17.7.2 broke route planning for many people. This was patched
last night but has now been fixed properly, the code tidied up, and some extra
little bits to do with new places added
Release 8.17.7.2 - 22 August 2006
I've found out what the bugs were - they were all consequences of allowing
new places to be searched for - the program was then blowing up when trying to
calculate routes through them! I've activated some code that was meant to
check for this, but failing miserably. Let's see if it's any better.
I've also added another quote from Steve Haywood. Well he did ask
Release 8.17.7.1 - 21 August 2006
- There are two or three very strange bugs since I upgraded the placefinder,
that are sneaking past all my debugging traps (I cannot reproduce them from
the data dumps I get). I've put some experimental code in to keep a few more
details before things crash, to see if that helps me debug them. In the
meantime, sorry for this - and my thanks for your patience
- Gazetteer options no longer crash
- Another quote
Release 8.17.7 - 16 August 2006
- Four tweaks that had been implemented pre-release have been
integrated:
- POI icons show on maps on first appearance, not only on switching type
- Preferred zoom is correctly implemented
- Preferred zoom range increased
- Moderated new coordinates are shown on the map
- If you drag the green icon, it's final resting place is recorded, not
where it was last clicked
- Lots of piddling little bug tweaks to placefinder that you are not
concerned about the details of
- You can now add photos from the gazetteer page
- Another few places added
Release 8.17.6.1 - 6 August 2006
- You can now add photos directly from the gazetteer - just follow the link
at the end of the "... is on the ..." text
- I've made some improvements to the "suggest a new place" code, hopefully
to avoid some very strange results that have been working their way into the
data from time to time
Release 8.17.6.1 - 6 August 2006
The new placefinder was too enthusiastic and tended to produce places off
the waterways when it could have matched somewhere on them. Eg "upton" or
"whaddon". Thanks to Steve for spotting and reporting
Release 8.17.6 - 6 August 2006
- By presorting I've reduced the time taken to merge POI data from 3 minutes
to 12 seconds (a 15 fold speed-up). It also doesn't work the machine so hard
that MP3 playback hiccups! No benefit for the users (except for reducing
the down-time during a rebuild) but a lot nicer for me.
- I've written a lot of code to make adding new places easier
- I've added a heap of (well, 43) new places - it's still slow work, but probably about
as fast as it can be. And don't let that put you off - the K&A is a lot
better as a result of this work.
- When you suggest changed coordinates for a place, the green marker is
draggable which makes it easier to tweak
- A bug that caused "look up" (from the drop-down menu) to fail if the place
had an alias has been fixed. This also fixed a bug where changeplace would
sometimes fail
Release 8.17.5 - 5 August 2006
- Most of the unknown place facility has been internalised, speeding it up
enormously. Some tweaks have been made to the scoring - let's see how it
works from now on
- New places can now found - part of the above
- A link to a recycling facilities page added
- A few general typos fixed. One more quote
Release 8.17.4.2 - 3 August 2006
Some lock adjustments made to Lapworth and Hatton. Credit to Bob Wood and
Captian Beeky
Release 8.17.4.1 - 1 August 2006
A quite remarkable bug has been fixed - see the blog for more details
Release 8.17.4 - 31 July 2006
Improvements to the gazetteer options - you can chose the default map
display and scale (which should be very useful for those who adjust
coordinates) and also select if you want poi icons on each sort of map
Release 8.17.3 - 23 July 2006
- Thanks to a lucky bug I discovered I'd made a logical error when adding the
daily virtual cruises - there was a better, and easier, way to do it. Now implemented
- More POI data added - it's getting time I started allowing people to
select which of this they want to see
- Alternative and Complementary Medicines and Therapies
- Roman, Iron Age, Prehistoric, Early Churches, Crosses, Castles and other Ancient Sites
- Attractions
Release 8.17.2.2 - 23 July 2006
- Another attempt at that pling fix - it helps if you type the code
correctly, you know
- More places added
Release 8.17.2.1 - 23 July 2006
- Tweaks to browsephoto and browseinfo to try to resolve a long standing
problem reported many times by Peter Stockdale of stray plings getting into
place references
- Circum-Birmingham Ring renamed to "Round Birmingham Ring"; removing the
'-' was necessary for technical reasons, and it now actually works
Release 8.17.2 - 22 July 2006
Recent emails and a discussion on uk.rec.waterways have convinced me that
work on a more flexible scheduler, that allows manual adjustment of the
predicted stopping places, is the next big piece of work that is called for.
With luck I'll have it by the end of the year. Before I get properly down to
that, the decks need clearing of lots of little bits that are lying around
waiting to be done. Here's a start
- Assorted typos fixed [thanks for Peter Stockdale for nagging]
- A bug where "quickest" routes crashed out with a bug report has been
fixed
- You can produce a virtual cruise for any day of the itineraries [based on
a suggestion by Richard Deeley]
- Some lock flights (those with no intermediate places) failed when entered into the placefinder (eg, putting
"Foxton Locks" in failed).
- A distance on the Chesterfield fixed, thanks to Phil Lamb
- A very short "turn round here" in the Warwickshire Ring fixed [thanks to
Peter Stockdale]
- The most extreme N,S,E and W places on your route are mentioned in the
itinerary
- A few new places added
- A typo in the quotes fixed
Release 8.17.1 - 16 July 2006
More POI data sets added:
- Food: McDonalds, Bakers
- Chains: Halfords, Argos, Borders
- Misc shops: Autioneers, Antique shops, Book Shops, Chandlers
- Others: Wireless hotspots, Railway Stations
Release 8.17.0.2 - 30 June 2006
Added Cinemas, Post Offices and Chemists to the POI data sets
Release 8.17.0.1 - 30 June 2006
- Lock count at Bank Newton fixed - credit Terry Streeter
- Lots of submitted places added - particular thanks to Mike Askin for many
of these
and for patience
- Browse photos now automatically bug reports. A bug in it (to do with
logging on) now fixed
licensed POI data
This release marks a step change in the amount and quality of local data in
CanalplanAC. I have entered into (for one year at least) a licensing deal to
add geographic Point of Interest data. This appears in the gazetteer maps and
in the gazetteer text. I've got plans to use this to enhance the Itineraries
as well.
In this release I've started to add a few of what I expect to be the most
popular types of data (OK, I admit it, it's some of the pubs, plus some
shops). Over the next couple of months I'll add all the data, and enhance the
functionality (allow you to select what sort of places you want shown, and to
decide how close they need to be for you to be interested for example -
currently the cut-off distance for each set is defined at build time)
I'll also add functions to allow people to report duplicate entries, and to
enhance any of my original data so that it too is shown on the maps
In other work, I've tweaked, yet again, the unknown place code to prevent
places off the waterways outranking aliases
Release 8.16.6.1 - 29 May 2006
- You can add photographs directly from the virtual cruise page
- The River Nene has been extended, and the Westbridge (Brampton) Arm
added
- I've tweaked the "suggest new coordinates feature" in the gazetteer
- Some prototyped changes and improvements to moderation made
substantive
- I've started making some other changes, mainly to the gazetteer in support
of a major new source of data - keep watching for details!
- The Google Local selectors finally work
Release 8.16.6 - 21 May 2006
- I've done some automatic web spidering and data collecting to try to find
more waterside pubs and to add phone numbers, at least, for the existing ones.
I'm sure that while this has increased the data enormously it has also thrown
up a few errors or misplaced pubs. Please let me know if you find any of
these. This has increased the number of pubs by over 400. More work in this
area is planned
- Instead of saying when a pub is "off the towpath" it now says if it knows it is "canalside". This is less egregious when wrong
- A typo corrected in the events list
- I've been trying to get drop down Google Local selectors to work in
IE. I still can't work out why they don't, and I can't run IE on any local
machine to find out why. I don't seem to have broken them in any different
browser. Yet.
Release 8.16.5 - 13 May 2006
- Virtual cruise enhancements:
- A less intrusive "no photo" picture is used
- Layout has been tweaked slightly
- There is a new "automatic" feature
- A summary of shops, pubs etc, and any informative text, is provided below
the map
- Button-link items (next and previous in Virtual Cruise for example) now
have better behaviour when moused over
- Maps don't falsely route up the Droitwich
- Back in April (release 8.16.1.6) I said: I've
turned on the "don't stop in long lockflights" feature on prompting from Ric
Wickhan. I'm not quite sure why it was turned off - everything seems to be
working well. It may be just that I was holding back on it until I had time
to be around to watch what happens. But I am rather worried that such a large
bit of code (several hundred lines of script, and a similar amount of C in the
engine to support it) had never been activated. I'll watch and see what
happens. I've now found out - a very small number of routes go most
peculiar in the itineraries and it routes you down the wrong waterway, and
then blows up when it runs out of days to do the trip in. I've turned it off
for the moment, but will work on exactly what is going wrong (it's something
deep in the insides of route.c - which is so core to the whole program that
I'm not going to play with it casually at a time when I don't have a lot of
time to spare to catch it if it all falls over).
Release 8.16.4.1 - 7 May 2006
- Virtual cruises now show accumulating distances
- Virtual cruises show a bit of information about the place (postcode, lat
and long, OS reference, the usual extra bit of text that many places
have).
Site indexes
- Web statistics have been moved back a level, and a new "quotes" page
added; waterways quotes are hard to find, so I thought I'd put mine out in a
way that search engines can find
- In a similar way, an ancient automatic index to make it easy for search
engines to find places and waterways info has finally been fully implemented
and turned on
- I've also turned my database of notable events in waterways history into a
browsable page
- From a pointer on the Google Maps API list I downloaded a greatly enhanced
list of UK places from Nearby.org.uk. This is
used when someone enters a real place that isn't on the waterways. This
takes me from just under 800 to over 14,000 places. I've had to change the
code to cope with it (a simple search worked fine before, but now takes far
too long) and these places aren't yet (and may never be) used in the
CanalplanAC wire frame maps or in the anti-spam script hider. This will mean
that people who aren't waterways experts will find it easier to find their
nearest waterway
Release 8.16.3.1 - 6 May 2006
- No error at the bottom of the gazetteer (108 emails received while I ate
lunch!)
- Virtual cruise enhancements
- "no photos" now displays (picture hadn't uploaded)
- "Next" button doesn't move when "previous" appears
- There isn't a broken image symbol while initial loading is taking
place
- Photos get captions with who took them and when
Virtual Cruises
- Some internal re-engineering to make development and server look more
similar without displaying google adverts on the development version
- A couple of tweaks to the Geographical Place Match
- A tweak or two to place name matching
- A brand new "virtual cruise" feature. This uses lots of photos and Google
Maps and is really only practical for those on a Broadband connexion. There
is lots more to do with this (it doesn't show any information about places or
information about photos, or multiple photos, or ...) but in the spirit of
this site it's put up for you to play with and comment. This is my first real
foray into the world of Ajax
coding techniques. It's quite fun!
Release 8.16.2.1 - 30 April 2006
- Paul Balmer pointed out how matching didn't always work properly ("Cooper
Junction" didn't produce "Cooper Bridge Junction"). It does now (and does a
lot more rather clever sound-alike word for word partial matching).
Release 8.16.2 - 30 April 2006
- Improvements to data verification and addition of changed coordinates -
all changed coordinates have been revalidated:
- No place may be moved by more than 5km - that's clearly an error
- Coordinates of moved places not displayed - one less thing to mistype
- It ticks you off it you try to plan a route explicitly through a place you
have also excluded
- You can look at other people's photographs - just click their name on the
list of contributors (from the photographs menu)
- There is a nice Google Map popup when you add a new place
- Several contributed places have been incorporated
- This seems the right place to say a big "thanks!" to Geoff who has been
doing a lot of behind-the-scenes tweaking of place coordinates, and also
adding new places
Release 8.16.1.6 - 27 April 2006
- I've turned on the "don't stop in long lockflights" feature on prompting
from Ric Wickhan. I'm not quite sure why it was turned off - everything seems
to be working well. It may be just that I was holding back on it until I had
time to be around to watch what happens. But I am rather worried that such a
large bit of code (several hundred lines of script, and a similar amount of C
in the engine to support it) had never been activated. I'll watch and see
what happens
Release 8.16.1.5 - 25 April 2006
- It now reports when you have made the route impossible through excluding
places (another bug caught in Saturday's trap)
- Some quickest routes were not - the adjustments made on Saturday hadn't
gone far enough - [Credit: Neil Ratcliffe].
Release 8.16.1.4 - 23 April 2006
- Failures to plan route because of excluded waterways are properly
announced (yesterday's traps did their job)
Release 8.16.1.3 - 23 April 2006
- Automatic coordinate adding made smoother (not visible to users)
- Development options removed from gazetteer maps
Release 8.16.1.2 - 23 April 2006
- Weighting around Lapworth altered to avoid strange routes and "alternative
route" failing
- I've put a line under the historical event on the index page
- Setting cookies from Gazeteer works again (as predicted, the automatic
content-type did break something)
- Increased a threshold to prevent a few strange places upsetting the
placematch code
Release 8.16.1.1 - 22 April 2006
- "My photos" is restored (and enhanced to show them in pages of 50) -
thanks to Peter Stockdale for reminding me about this
Release 8.16.1 - 22 April 2006
- "Twelfth" has replaced "twelveth" (which was a software bug, not a
spelling mistake) - credit to Bob Hallam
- Some quickest routes were failing to generate properly. Route generation
code fixed, and some traps put in (this is closely related to a bug where some
preferred routes failed to generate that I fixed many moons ago). Credit to
Mike Askin
- Pressing "Suggest" on gazetteer with no place selected no longer creates a
suggestion to move the place to OS Grid Ref 000000,000000 - which is just off
the Scilly Isles - credit Steve Atty
- I've done some clever stuff with automatically generating content-types.
This will make it a lot easier to write clever pages that revector and the
like in the future, but it's more than likely that something important will
have broken along the way.
- I've been moving the Google ads around and playing with them. I'm trying
to get a balance between making them obvious and attractive and them getting
in the way of the main purpose of the site, which is route planning, not
advertising! If anyone has strong views on the way I'm doing it, please let
me know
Release 8.16.0.2 - 9 April 2006
- The "system being upgraded" screen has been restored
- Gazetteer javascript improved (invisibly)
- www.mihalis.net redirects to www2.mihalis.net, so the maps now work
Release 8.16.0.1 - 9 April 2006
I'd like to take this chance to "name-and-shame" hotpop.com who, despite
claiming a vigorous "anti-spam" policy do absolutely nothing in response to
reports that their "free mailboxes" are used by people who have the sole aim in
life of abusing and, eventually, destroying other web sites.
Although they do at least have a an automated response to emails to
"abuse", which is more than AOL do. But the action they take is identical.
- Added VML stuff to get polylines working on IE
- Memory reclaimation added to google map code
- Yet more effort on defeating email subversion
- A bit more documentation scattered about internally
Google maps
The prototype release of a brand new feature - Google maps for route maps.
Google maps really is a very nice package with a remarkably easy to use
API. I've decided to implement a fairly basic set of features to start with,
and then add and improve as I learn and as people suggest things.
The following are known limitations at the moment:
- The only places shown are those in the original viewport - as you scroll
it doesn't label places that come into view
- The scaling is chosen for the original zoom level. If you zoom in you
will see that the resolution is poor with the line taking short cuts. It
really should redraw at the appropriate scale as you zoom
- There are no symbols for bridges, locks etc
- The line probably should get fatter as you zoom in. It certainly needs to
be a bit stronger as sometimes it gets lost in the motorways
- The new checkbox is ugly and misplaced - but all that needs redesigning anyway
An additional fix -
- New places don't fail in the gazetteer any more (broken when gazetteer maps
added)
Release 8.15.16.3 - 4 April 2006
- A day after I introduced Google Maps, they changed the API! I've now
ported the Gazetteer maps to v2.44
- I've added a catch for some of the most irritating automated attempts to
subvert the "email me" page (note this again - yet more effort that ought to
be going to give you a better website is going in this fruitless and never
ending arms race)
- You can turn google maps on and off from the gazetteer options.
- You can change gazetteer settings from the gazetteer (the "change user settings" button).
Release 8.15.16.2 - 3 April 2006
A tweak to make moderation of changed coordinates less painful
Release 8.15.16.1 - 3 April 2006
A fix to make the Google Maps in the gazetteer work with IE - which doesn't
like finding the javascript where it is needed (and fails in a very
uninformative way when it does). I found a very good explanation of the
problem at Ryan Grant's website.
Fixing it has been an absolute pain - since at the time I was generating the
header for the gazetteer pages I didn't even have the coordinates which I need to
generate the function. I've had to change data blocks, break large chunks of
HTML into little ones, introduce slightly different versions of procedures and
add a global variable to preserve state information between the header and the
body of the text. Horrid, horrid, horrid. The sooner I don't have to code
for IE the better - if I hadn't got it to work in another 5 minutes all IE
users were going to get in place of the map was a message and a link to where
to download Firefox! (although, in mitigation I suppose I should acknowledge
that IE is working within specs, it's just being a bit inflexible and
unhelpful about it)
Release 8.15.16 - 2 April 2006
I've finally gone Broadband. This should let me develop things that work
with external websites in more sophisticated ways. The first example of this
is the use of google maps in the gazetteer.
As well as showing the maps (I'm going to expand this - to put icons on for
locks etc and to use google maps for itinerary pages) I've put in the ability
to correct coordinates when places are now shown in quite the right spot
At the start of 2004 I started logging all the automatic and user selected
replacements for place names made by the program. I downloaded this to date
(all 21M of it - and when I was still on dial-up - ouch!) and started to
analyse it. By seeing what sort of changes have been made (and in particular,
poor automatic replacements - of both sorts) I'm able to find improvements to
the place matching code. Often I just need to add an alias to the data, but
the following code changes have been made:
- Br, Lk, Jn, Jct, Junc, Jtn all expand to the obvious
- A search for "Bridge 7" or "Lock 5" produces a list of all such numbered
bridges or locks
- A search for Braunston Locks produces the flight to select from
- I've added regular expression substitution, rather than just matching, to
the scripting language to support this
I obviously run the dangers of people finding all of this as irritating as
I find Microsoft's autocorrect (nevermind the famous DWIM incident), but so
far I think this part of the program does just what it should
Other stuff
- Google ads have been integrated properly (a quick hack was done to test
them on the server). This is proving to be much more successful than I
expected, and could well help to fund further work (it looks like it will at
least pay for my ADSL connexion!) on the program
- The Gazetteer pages redirect to ones based on the Canalplan ID to help
search engines always find the same versions of pages
- A stray space that caused problems with the Birmingham to Wolverhampton
Mail Line Railway Bridge has been removed, a check for this has been put into
the build process, and a couple of other examples removed.
- A typo ("seach" for "search") has been fixed
Release 8.15.15 - 18 March 2006
- A wodge of stuff on rings:
- Descriptions of rings - when they exist - are displayed on "load ring" screen
- The Stourport Ring no longer offers starting places on the Droitwich Canals(!)
- A new ring - the "Stour Valley Ring" - has been added
- More of the rings now have descriptions
- Clicking on the waterway name to get more places now works again - it
probably broke in February of last year!
- A "get Firefox" box has been added to the index page
- The main lines of the Grand Junction and the Warwick and Birmingham now
appear in the place finder and photo adding pages [reported by Michael Askin]
- An arithmatic bug (I forgot to multiply hours by 60 before subtracting
them from minutes) in the "how many days" will this take code has been fixed
[bug report by John]. This is another very long standing bug.
- I've also changed the text that is output at the end of the route lists
and tables to make it slightly clearer what is happening
- The web statistics have been got at:
- A much quicker sort and display has been produced
- The spammer stats for execution are shown
- Email subjects don't get truncated as violently (over enthusiastic
anti-spam stuff)
- There is a new, short, what's new in this version page, accessible
directly from the home page
Release 8.15.14.2 - 16 March 2006
- Two missing error messages in "create place" fixed
- Four places on the River Hull submitted by a user have been added
- The Macclesfield Canal has been brought up to scratch
- The Frodington Beck has been added
- There is another quote
Release 8.15.14.1 - 6 March 2006
- Syntax in this news file improved
- Link to news item for 8.15.14 fixed and the date added
- The river to Corpse Landing has been added
- Marple Locks added as individuals
Move photographs
- Move photographs is now complete and has undergone some testing. As I
said when I first mentioned it, you can ask to have photographs moved and if
approved they happen automatically). Quite a few people have been contacting
me about this, having made mistakes, or spotted mistakes I've made. This will
make it a lot easier and safer than me poking around with files manually
- I've noticed from bug reports that sometimes people are part way through
doing things when I do an upgrade and it breaks things. I've now put a more
sophisticated check for when an update is in progress, and a way to get going again.
I've provided an automated script building process to support this
- The guestbook and email scripts hide themselves from spammers in an
entertaining way
- Three new places submitted by users have been added (Possett Bridge will
need to wait until I put all the Marple Locks in)
- A nasty bug was identified by Bob Smith (he called it "minor" - it wasn't!)
- which turned out to be an integer overflowing inside the weighting code when
doing alternative route calculations. I've changed the size of the integer,
and also put a catch and fail check in - so it will get reported if it ever
appears again
- Links to Jim Shead's site work again
- The range of OS grid coordinates has been extended, so places in Scotland
have proper map references again
Release 8.15.13.2 - 28 February 2006
I've been working on the ability to move photographs (well, you can ask to
have photographs moved and if approved they happen automatically). Quite a few people have been contacting me about
this, having made mistakes, or spotted mistakes I've made. This will make it a
lot easier and safer - but it's not turned on yet (this is an early release to
fix the broken button-style links mentioned below)
Along the way I've improved quite a few little bits in the moderation code
- almost all users will never see these
I've also made some changes to the scripting language to help me in doing
other things outside the CanalplanAC project - again, this should be
invisible
Some buttonified links have been reworked and should now work in some
versions of IE
Release 8.15.13.1 - 22 February 2006
A bug fix - I'd managed to make it several hundred miles from one end of
Burnley to the other. It isn't, even if it feels like it sometimes. Thanks
to John Sharpe for spotting this. I've now added a check to the data build,
and fixed two other anomalies (where the stored distance is radically
different from the straight line distance) - over time I can tighten up the
tolerance here and tidy the data up further
Release 8.15.13 - 18 February 2006
A moderate piece of coding (I've not done any C for ages, and fancied
something clever) to allow embedded script inside template blocks that are
copied to web pages (up to now expressions have been allowed, but that's
all). This should make it easier to write some pages, and allow for some good
general tidying up of the text structure and generally make it more maintainable
I've done a bit of this, deliberately in important places, so I should find
out pretty quickly if it fails
Apart from that, a collection of little bits:
- New places that people have put in from the photo entry pages before the
weekend have been added
- A bug where the tidying up on moderation failed has been fixed (normal
users wouldn't have noticed this)
- Some debugging info at the top of the guestbook has been removed
- New places now tell me who has added them
- A few more places on the L&L added
- Improved linking to news items from home page - links are working again,
and the whole thing is more efficient
- Unmoderated guestbook items are shown on the home page, like photos
- Both of these don't have a trailing 's' when there is one item
Release 8.15.12.1 - 18 February 2006
Told you!
- Super new database for messages turned off, as the build process wasn't
robust (it went live before enough testing)
- A "make it fail" removed (used to test emails for bugs still worked)
- Adding photos with a bad ID no longer errors
- Downloads don't fail because they can't email
Release 8.15.12 - 17 February 2006
This is a bit of a patch release. I had to take CanalplanAC off line
because it was being abused to send spam. I was part way through adding new
features, and didn't really want to branch-and-merge, so have released it at
this stage. Expect regular fixes over the next few days - I'm expecting a
fair few bugs
- It was possible to upload a photo with a leading space in the ID, this
then got lost in the system. The three that were stuck there have been
rescued, and the loophole fixed
- Another several hours that ought to have been spent improving the site
have been spent on spam fighting
- Script names changed from the obvious
- All emailing gathered in a single place to ease enhancements
- Much more checking and stripping put it - I just hope I can read
legitimate mails!
-
- A lot of stuff involving the new places that can be added
- Creation is improved - no different for users, but more useful data stored
- New places can now be looked up in the gazetteer by ID
- New places are spotted if you use them by ID in route planning
- More of this is to come - you'd have had it by now if ...
- A major change has been made to the way that template texts are output.
This should be invisible to users, but reduce the workload on the server and
potentially make things quicker
- A first start has been made on rationalising canned texts, and on
standardising on title messages
Release 8.15.11.1 - 6 February 2006
- Fixed a bug when you tried to remember yourself
- the new search box and access from Firefox, promised yesterday, have
materialised this time
- Empty gazetteer comments can now be edited safely
Improved Firefox search plugin. Places can be added (allowing
photos of places not in the database to be submitted)
- Improvement to the firefox search plugin. You can now do simple routes by
typing a list of places, separated by commas, into the search box
- The same functionality added to the home page
- It is now possible to submit photos of places that aren't yet in the
Canalplan database. The information about the new place is collected and will
appear automatically in the next release of the software
- Add photos now automatically reports bugs
- Many old passwords were failing to verify after the bugfix in release
8.15.10. I hope they now work again - send an email if yours doesn't
Release 8.15.10 - 3 February 2006
- Yet more work to try to keep those spamming mudsuckers out of my site.
They were now trying to stuff their illegal pill adverts into the route
planner: this didn't do anything useful, of course, but did send me error
messages. So I've now tested for them and tried to tarpit them for good
measure. I really hope this doesn't break anything. Please everybody,
before you ever consider buying anything from spammers, remember that they are
making me put energy into protecting the site, rather than make it better for
you. Did I say I hated them, and wished that every member of their families
died slowly and unpleasently? Well I do and I do.
- Photographers can now chose to have their ID remembered (in a cookie) to
save them having to log on each time
- A bug in password entry, that added random characters to short passwords
and caused them to fail sometimes, has been fixed
- It is less enthusiastic about filling in places that don't match very well
at all (data from the check added at 8.15.9.1 which is now removed)
Release 8.15.9.2 - 22 January 2006
- Thumbnails in gazetteer made smaller and more consistent in size
- I think I've improved the formatting of church names without breaking
anything
- Postcodes don't break between the two parts (so on narrow screens, it
breaks the line between "postcode" and the start, not in the middle)
-
Release 8.15.9.1 - 22 January 2006
- I can now add new comments to the guestbook again
- A check on automatic but sketchy automatic replacements added, so I
can see how they reckless they are
Release 8.15.9 - 22 January 2006
- Quote of the day improved where no source document has been
identified
- A new "comment" feature added to gazetteer. This is a sort of tester to
see how interested people are in this sort of thing. If it gets a lot of use
I'll almost certainly replace it with some sort of wiki to allow much more
sophisticated collaberative working
Firefox search plugin
There is now a Firefox search plugin. Just click on the link to install
it. You can then look up anywhere in the gazetteer from the Firefox search
box (click on the arrow to find the Canalplan entry, put the name in and press enter)
Release 8.15.7.4 - 18 January 2006
New anti-spam features for the guestbook (pre-checking of name and location
field, simple scoring technique, moderation using photo moderation account
Release 8.15.7.3 - 11 January 2006
- GPX download is now as a .gpx file rather than a .xml file
- When generating a GPX file you are prompted for a route number
- A typo in a quotation has been fixed
- A bug where links to a very few, slightly special, places (those with
"anti_match") failed has been fixed
Release 8.15.7.2 - 8 January 2006
- Photograph statistics on home page reinstated (done pre-release)
- Placefinder search now always looks for boatyards and pubs as well as
places
- BCN upgrade - facilities, moorings, boatyards, text, winding holes
etc
- Alternative routes are prevented for loaded rings, because if you wanted a
ring, you don't want alternatives that aren't anything like a ring
- There is a slideshow option for places with lots of photos
Release 8.15.7.1 - 2 January 2006
- Some multiple postcodes removed, and a check for this put in
- Data improvements
- The Middlewich Branch increased in accuracy
- The Caldon Main Line to Froghall
- The Caldon Leek Branch
- I've made a start on a backlog of photographs people have emailed me,
several years ago in some cases.
Notes on earlier releases
Future Plans
See the Planned Improvements page