Its been a long time since I really put any time into this site. I have been trying to get through some pictures and get them up here when I can. I am also working on a few other bigger projects that will directly affect this site. But a few weeks ago I was finally forced to work on this site again.

A few weeks ago I added the AddThis.com functionality to my site. At that same time I changed 1 small aspect of each location page. The day after, my daily visitors dropped dramatically. You can read more about it here. With that issue I found myself needing to clean up code, clean up HTML, and add some additional functionality to the website. I hope that this functionality will be a good upgrade to this site.

Share This Site

Like I mentioned above, I installed the social sharing service provided through AddThis.com. It easily allows users to share the current page that they are on in many different ways. They can print, send to facebook/twitter/social networking sites, and even easily add a bookmark. It is a free service that adds a lot of punch. So far I have had about 15 “shares”. Thats good for this site.

Comments

I have had comments enabled on this site for a long time. But a year or so ago I was forced to take them down after having some large issues with SPAM. One day at work my boredom got the best of me and I searched google for “How do I get comments on my site”. One of the first few results was for Discus.com. I had already heard of this service and started to look into it a bit deeper. It turned out to be a good solution for Carabs. Its now there for all to use.

Google Maps API V3

I have been using the same old Google Maps V2.x maps on the site for a long time. I also had some rather bad programming that generated my code based on files that were generated blah blah blah. It was a complex a silly way of handling creating a map. I decided to start playing with the newer version of google maps (v3). It is not as robust as v2, but it works for my needs. To make this work, I had to upgrade the location system on this site to hold the Lat and Lon of the center point of each location in the system. One issue with this upgrade is that I needed to remove all the old maps on the site. Many of these displayed parking info and track information. I hope that I’ll get these back u in a few weeks. We’ll see.

Nearby Places

With the upgrade to google maps v3, and the addition of latitude and longitude of each location, I was able to make a new “Nearby Locations” feature at the bottom of each location page. it queries the DB and grabs the closest 10 locations, spits on the name/distance for each one to the screen, and generates a map with all the points. Its pretty basic, but I think its adds something to the site.

More?

I do have a few more plans for carabs, but they are going to have to wait. Like I mentioned above I hope to get additional information displayed for each location. This will come in time, but it’ll come. I also hope to make some upgrades to how the locations are displayed altogether. I mean right now all you get is a long list. How is that really useful?  And of course new pix. They wil lcome when they can.

Enough for now.