More on layout

I think this deserves a post of its own, rather than another comment. But I'll address the side issue of links to the pages etc in a comment on that "thread".

Tasha's photo collage idea is really stimulating - but I think this is yet another thing for the WIBNI list - perhaps as a placefinder navigation device or something.

That's a strong vote of confidence from Paul for the menu and reduced text idea, so I'll defintely continue in that direction. I think for things that are cheap to generate I'll send them down the wire with some stylesheet/javascript to turn them on and off (the way the "show/hide list of excluded waterways works in the options page). For more expensive things (which find nearest certainly is, which rules out having "the nearest waterpoint is at..." on each page (also part of this upgrade involves extending this to "fine nearest pub" etc using the POI data)) I think an AJAX approach to seamlessly fetch and display them would work well.

I think, also, that user configuration of what is shown would be good, with two or three predefined layouts including "everything" and "low bandwidth".

What I might well do is to summarise local facilities ("Show map with pubs, shops and railway station"; "See list of local shops, museums and wireless hotspots") when they aren't displayed. I've also always planned to allow people to chose what things are of interest to them (I will always want to see lists of pubs and second-hand bookshops; others may be more interested in burger bars and wireless hotspots).

I'm having interesting thoughts about a randomly, but weighted, selected photo with buttons to vote on how much you like it (which affects the weighting) as well.

Giving an approx walking time for the distances is a nice idea. They are "as the crow flies" ones, so I'll have to see if that comes up with anything particularly silly.

I'll just keep plodding away. I'm creating this as a separate script, so as soon as I have something half decent I'll publish it and point blog readers to it.