Category Archives: Site Design

Google Maps Updated

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.

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

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.