Whilst checking the work website yesterday I noticed that the Google Maps powered postcode based route finder had stopped working. Back when the site was in developement I found to my delight that UK postcode searching via Google’s API was now a possibility, so we decided to have an interactive map rather than a boring static one.

I did some research and found this from a Google employee:

Earlier this week, we fixed a bug that was allowing the precise location of full UK postcodes on the Google Maps API. This is functionality that, due to data usage terms and conditions, we cannot yet offer our API users but we hope to be able to offer this service in the future.

The data usage terms and conditions refers that the fact that the Royal Mail own the copyright on postcode data and charge rather hefty fees to license their database. Not wishing to pay those fees I set about finding another way and found this page. This example uses Google’s Local search to geocode the postcode then uses that geocode to search Google Maps. I used the usePointFromPostcode function in our own map and modified some existing bits in map the page to make use of the new function. And finally it’s now back up and running.

Oxeye Daisy map page

It snowed on Sunday (18th Nov) night, I can’t honestly remember it ever snowing so early. Hopefully this bodes well for having some decent snow this winter.

Not long started snowing.

The view from my study.

Earlier in the year I signed up with koodos, an online shop. They were going to have a sale on iPods and I wanted to be notified when this sale began. I’m very protective of my email address, I never give out my personal address to any old company. I use the format of company name at my domain that way when I receive spam I have a fairly good idea where its come from.

Gradually I started to get spam sent to the address I’d given to koodos. I logged back in to their site to see if I’d missed anything, according to my details I was set to receive email from koodos. I then checked their privacy policy which states:

We will never pass on your email address on to a 3rd party for marketing purposes unless you have chosen ‘3rd party opt-in’ as one of your communication preferences within My Account. We will, however send your details to merchants for whom you have indicated interest by purchasing products offered by them on koodos.

I emailed them and was told that they currently did not pass on any details to third parties, it seems that bit is in their privacy statement possibly for future use. Today, as of 16:35 I have received 20 spam to that address. I’m not sure what’s more worrying; that they possibly play to sell their customers details to whatever company when you buy one of the products listed on koodos or that they are insisting that they have not sold my details yet clearly an email address that has been used once at one site is now being bombarded with spam. It has certainly put me off the idea of using their website and trusting them with any more personal information.

For the last year I’ve been using a set of bare CSS templates I’d built as the basis of the websites I design. I’m thinking of updating them so I need to revisit the following:

Font sizing

Currently I’m using pixels with a conditional stylesheet for IE that contains font sizes set in the equivalent percentages. The theory was I set up the IE sizes last when the site is basically finished, all I had to do is run through the main CSS and match any pixel sizes to percentages. The main problem I had with this was the addition of elements in the site after I had designed the pages led to the IE sizes not always being set, a problem with project management really and there being too much interpretation of the spec.

Image replacement

Should I be replacing say an H1 tag in the header with a logo image? This would make setting up PDA versions of sites easier but what are the implications of this? What about those people who have images switched off but CSS switched on?