Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Location, Location, Location

I've been working on the Location view. I think that I will make reports on venues a primary focus of the community directories. Here are a few of the changes:

The first change is that I show the location summary and event list side by side. You can view the page for Red Butte Gardens. This was somewhat of a fundamental change. I had designed all of the pages to be long and skinny. That way the directory could exist in a frame of other sites, or as a small box. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get a good scalable CSS design for the calendar. So, I've decided to go fixed width. Both the calendar and location pages will be 840 pixels wide.

I've also just started to play with Google Maps. That way I can include a handy link to a Location Map.

What I am doing at this point in time is just indexing events that take place at major venues in the community. My long term hope is that some venues actually decide to use this system as their event calendar.

Friday, July 06, 2007

Site Maps

FWIW, I added XML site maps to the community directories.

The maps are neither pretty, nor are they useful for humans. The maps are supposed to be useful by search engines. This is an example. This is the Index to the site maps.

The only useful information that the maps contain is an update time stamp. It took me a whole day of programming to figure out how to get the correct information into that timestamp.

The main advantage of the sitemap protocol is for dynamic web sites where the data changes randomly on a regular basis.

It will be interesting to see if the maps have any positive effects on visitors to the site.

BTW, the directory structure has had over 4 million hits. There's about 17,000 listings in the directory. That is about 235 hits per listing. When I put the directories together. The totals are lower than I was hoping to see.