Various and Sundry Updates
Ha! I always wanted to use “Various and Sundry” in a title (this sentence may or may not be a lie).
First: A beermapping.com Article!
Heather Lynn from Associated Content has written a long article about myself and the Beer Mapping Project. You can read that article here. Also feel free to vote on that article or leave her a comment about it. Please try to keep all of my dirty laundry out of her comment section! Thanks Heather!
Second: More Power to the Info Bubble!
I have tried to focus on how to give the beermapping user as much information in the “information bubble” as possible (the “info bubble” is… see picture below). On the second tab of the bubble, I have recently added a couple more search choices that will show up for some of the options and I have removed some of the choices for other options.
There is now a button for Yahoo Weather that creates a direct link to the Yahoo Weather forecast for the zip code of the location that you are looking at. Currently there are some broken zip codes in the database (mostly North Eastern states that have zips that start with a zero), but I am working to fix those.
I figure that some of you are using the maps in your own states or even your own cities (I know I do). But for those longer trips where weather could become a factor, hopefully someone will get some use out of it. Personally, I’ve been enjoying checking out the forecast for some of our Nation’s great breweries, brewpubs and beer bars. But maybe I’m just odd.
I have also added searches to yelp.com for brewpubs and beer bars. Breweries probably will not appear in their database. If you have never used yelp.com, they are a user driven site that is much like citysearch.com. I seem to enjoy yelp.com a bit more than citysearch so that is why I chose to link them from that information page. Also, if the location you are searching for exists in yelp.com, you should be able to see a tiny map of the surrounding area that may help you find other places worth visiting within a short distance.
I have switched the beeradvocate search to perform a google “I’m feeling lucky” search since beeradvocate requires registration in order to use search options. I am not trying to circumvent their system by doing this, and I have gotten permission in the past from them to create outside searches of their site in this manner. Regardless, it is worth the cost of free to go ahead and register there if you have not already. The beerme.com and the ratebeer.com searches are also running off of a google query now. If these searches start turning up poor results, let me know and I will turn them back to their original queries through the respective site’s database.
Third: Browser Issues
The “Final” version of Internet Explorer 7 has been released. Most IE users are probably still running IE6 at the moment, but in the very near future (possibly November), they will be rolling IE7 out through Windows Update. If you have informed your machine that you wish for it to automatically download and install updates, you may wake up one morning and have a new browser to use. I have been using IE7 for a few weeks now and I do like it better than IE6. It does render pages a bit more like it should, but there are still some bugs with how our maps here have been designed. The main issue currently is with the drop down select menu that allows you to jump to and from map to map. This can be fixed though, and I will hopefully have it straightened out by the time Microsoft rolls out the software.
Hopefully I’ll be able to continue supporting IE6, but I am no longer using it as a standard. When the new Internet Explorer is released, I suggest that you go ahead and get it, since many web developers will be jumping on it because it is more compliant to the current web standards.
As always, I am open to your suggestions, concerns or ideas on any of this. Feel free to “query” me by email or simply “query” us all by posting a comment!
2 Responses to “Various and Sundry Updates”
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Nice site!
Thank You