Category Archives: Site Design

Google Maps Updated

July 12, 2006General, Google Tools, Site Designhistorical

Maybe I missed it when it was first released, but Google Maps in the UK has had a bit of a revamp. Some of the imrpovements I’ve noticed have been :

Double clicking on a map zooms into the clicked location
Scroll wheel functions to zoom in / out.
Zooming retains the previously loaded images until the new ones load.
UI layout tweaks. The links from the right hand side of the search bar have now been moved to a more “tabbed” look underneath it

On the whole, I like the new features. The navigational controls are more intuitive, although I am going to have to unlearn some of the old behaviours. The scroll wheel functionality appears to me to be back-to-front. Certainly, in Google Earth scrolling the wheel down zooms in, and up zooms out. The implementation in Maps, though, is the opposite.

Google do spreadsheets.

June 30, 2006Site Design, Softwarehistorical

Google Spreadsheets (yep, another Google Beta ) looks great.

I’m not entirely sure how much use it will be to me, but for those without spreadsheet software, who may have a need to use it once in a while, I think this will be a great tool.

It’s not an original idea, though*. This kind of functionality appears in Microsoft’s Sharepoint Server 2007 Beta, but of course, that’s the kind of software you have to pay for – and far too complex / costly for the average user.

Whatever the level of user who is going to use this tool, I’m all for it. As long time readers will know, I’m a big fan of Google, and this is not doing anything to change my mind about that.

* Of course, Google could have come up with the idea first – I just don’t know.

Excuse of the Day in the sidebar

April 13, 2006PHP, Plugin, Site Design, Software, Wordpresshistorical

You may have spotted the “Excuse of the Day” at the top of the left sidebar. This isn't a WordPress plugin as such, but a small bit of PHP in one of the theme files. If you want to use the same code, there are a couple of things you need to do.

1) In my case, I am concious of not wanting to abuse Eric's bandwidth, so I have set up a shell script via cron to wget the feed file once per day. I'd recommend this for another reason – if, due to unforseen circumstances, meyerweb is down, your code will still work on your local copy.
2) Edit your theme file in the appropriate place to include this block.

We’ve gone orange!

April 9, 2006Avanade, Site Designhistorical

The more observant regular here may have spotted that we’ve turned orange. There is a reason, and some will already know what it is. I can’t say more until tomorrow. There are hints on this page, though.