Completed site release (The areas release)

[Conrad]

Just take advantage of this post to reply to some I missed yesterday.

I do undestand this is a new system and i am one of those people who dont like change that much and i will hopefully get to like the new format and forget the old one which i thought was good enough.

I think there is going to be quite a bit of getting used to on this and I am sure you will not be the only one feeling this way. The old format needed to be changed as it took us too much time to maintain it, we decided to take advantage of that change to try and improve it, time will tell

Guys,
Just wanted to say well done,the new release is a very elegant solution and ,from my point of view,is a considerable enhancement to an already fantastic website.The logic shines through.The city centres roll out will also help itinerant boozers like myself.

Thanks BF, it is appreciated. I am sure it will come as no surprise to hear that we love the new set up.

I've started on Sheffield Central. Can you please let me know if I am doing it right. I've started at the Bath Hotel and worked towards the city centre as far as Jocosa. Presumably you will be creating the Sheffield Central area on the main Sheffield page?

I think if you think it is central then it is fine (I haven't double checked you, Dave will reject it if he strongly disagrees). One of the nice things about this system is you can also remove areas though, so if anyone disagrees they can correct you back. I am hoping to be far less uptight about areas now we have this system in place as it has far less implication on our data if we get it wrong.

I read through the first post last night and didn't really understand it, read it this morning and still wasn't sure. However I've had a go and added Portobello and Leith as areas of Edinburgh and shoved a few pubs in there, hope it works and I've done it right.

I should have said, just try it if you are in doubt, it is complicated and I think the only way it will come together is as people try it out and work out how they want to use it.

It's a shame you couldn't retain the data from the old sub-districts set-up (I think they were called that) as everything now seems to be thrown into a larger postal town pot.

All data has been retained, in that respect the only change is the layout. In the old layout Postal Towns would have a list of the sub-districts (outlying areas, villages etc.) below the list of unallocated pubs and there was a button for showing the list of pubs in that sub-district. We have now just pulled them all back up into the Postal Town to display in the hope that the area (old sub-district's) pages will just make life easier. Anything that was previously in a sub-district will now be in an area of the same name.

I think the issue will be that until people go in and start setting up the surrounding area pages (and it does rely on a big amount of personal/local knowledge) there are going to be whole swathes of the country that look a bit confusing. Is it possible that they may also appear to be non existent as well, for instance if I searched for pubs in Portobello before I'd set up the area I'm guessing it wouldn't have returned anything. Just tried this with Newington, another sub-district of Edinburgh, and it doesn't recognise it as having any pubs.

The only place that should have less data now is London, this is because where I previously gave the postal codes the designated arbitrary postal district name I have now stripped that back to just being the postcode. I am hoping the London members will enjoy cleaning that up though as it has frequently been a talking point that London was bad anyway.

From memory the sub-district's round Edinburgh had never been addressed (Dave or someone can correct me if this is wrong) so you are broaching new ground there.

I think the Postal District/Town pages are going to be more confusing now to our members that are familiar with the old layout, I think new visitors will find it just as confusing as the old site.

Definitely relies as you say on local knowledge, but previously we have rejected that as we felt it was breaking the system down into tiny chunks. Now we can take advantage of that and over time have a far more informative system....... I hope

Edit: Forgot to say, if it isn't in the search you are right it isn't there. The search is a nightly update though, so anything you add will not appear till the following day.

[Old Blue]

I really like the new release- the area pages are excellent and the way the recently added items appear is very helpful. So many thanks Conrad and Dave, you've done a fab job with this.

One small query about how to apply to rural areas. Typically the 'postal town' is a town whose pubs are not in any 'area', and the 'areas' under it are smaller towns and villages around it. For example, Bridport postal town shows 44 pubs, of which 20 are in Bridport town and thus not in any 'area', and the other 24 are each in one of 17 different 'areas' which are smaller towns and villages. Although this means most of the areas are therefore now villages with only one entry, I think this is useful as I can immediately see that if e.g. I went to Loders I'd only have one pub to go to before presumably trekking to another area, whereas if I went to Burton Bradstock I'd have three. It would be helpful to create an 'area' for the 20 pubs in Bridport itself, so I could see them in that area view without the other 24 getting in the way. I would prefer that area also to be called 'Bridport', as that is what it is, but wondered whether it would matter if an area was called the same thing as the postal town. Otherwise I guess 'Bridport Town' would be the best alternative, but I definitely wouldn't want to call it anything like 'Bridport Central', which would be misleading as the other areas aren't part of Bridport, they are just associated because of the way the postal system works.

[Oggwyn Trench]

I really like the new release- the area pages are excellent and the way the recently added items appear is very helpful. So many thanks Conrad and Dave, you've done a fab job with this.

One small query about how to apply to rural areas. Typically the 'postal town' is a town whose pubs are not in any 'area', and the 'areas' under it are smaller towns and villages around it. For example, Bridport postal town shows 44 pubs, of which 20 are in Bridport town and thus not in any 'area', and the other 24 are each in one of 17 different 'areas' which are smaller towns and villages. Although this means most of the areas are therefore now villages with only one entry, I think this is useful as I can immediately see that if e.g. I went to Loders I'd only have one pub to go to before presumably trekking to another area, whereas if I went to Burton Bradstock I'd have three. It would be helpful to create an 'area' for the 20 pubs in Bridport itself, so I could see them in that area view without the other 24 getting in the way. I would prefer that area also to be called 'Bridport', as that is what it is, but wondered whether it would matter if an area was called the same thing as the postal town. Otherwise I guess 'Bridport Town' would be the best alternative, but I definitely wouldn't want to call it anything like 'Bridport Central', which would be misleading as the other areas aren't part of Bridport, they are just associated because of the way the postal system works.

I was thinking along the same lines while looking at Shrewsbury , maybe something like Town Centre would be better than Central for smaller places

[Conrad]

...., but I definitely wouldn't want to call it anything like 'Bridport Central', which would be misleading as the other areas aren't part of Bridport, they are just associated because of the way the postal system works.

I am confused by what you mean by this. If I read it right then you are saying there are 20 pubs in Bridport town. If those 20 pubs were added to something called 'Bridport Central' you would find that misleading? Or are you suggesting a different range of pubs would be in the Bridport central.

We had a certain amount of discussion in the office about what the actual heart of a postal town should be called, technically it is valid to call it 'Bridport' but we felt it would be easily confused with the Bridport Postal District to all but the most familiar with the site (arguably I guess that will always be the case), 'Bridport City Centre' and permutations like that were mentioned, but we were straying dangerously close to the definitions of cities, towns, villages et al. Eventually central was decided on as something that could be generically applied to everything.

I am actually quite relaxed on the word used, it is just whatever it is I would like it to be applied to every postal district on the system without needing debate about whether there is a Cathedral/Abbey there . We can retrospectively change Central if a new word is decided upon.

Not sure if I stumbled across an answer in there, let me know.

[Conrad]

Ah right having read Oggwyn's post I take it that basically somewhere like Bridport is small enough that it is a central area in it's own right. I take your point but I would like something that could be consistent across the whole site, so you could apply it to Bristol equally as well as Bridport.

My reasoning is to cut down on our overhead of checking it, but also just so that you know what to look for if you are used to the site.

How do others feel about the 'central' area in general? I am trying to decide how wedded I am to it now.

[Old Blue]

Thanks Conrad - I think it's only a point about the terminology used for the area of the postal town itself, not about which pubs to put into it. In large cities and towns we generally have a definable 'centre' which is somewhere near the centre and all the other areas are suburbs of that and are also themselves part of the city in the wider sense. But in rural areas the postal town may be a town that isn't actually very big, and isn't necessarily 'central' in any functional or geographic sense to the other areas. So whilst I think there should be an area in which the 20 Bridport pubs are found, calling it 'Bridport Central' feels slightly counter-intuitive as actually its the whole of Bridport itself, and the other 'areas' are not parts of Bridport but are other towns and villages in their own right. Deciding which pubs actually to put in which area is I think much easier in rural areas, as the towns and villages generally know what they are, rather than all being part of an urban sprawl which is difficult to divide up.

Are you dead set on always using 'central'? I can now see why you'd want to avoid calling the area the same thing as the postal town, but think some flexibility would help so we could call things "X Town", "Y Town Centre", or "Z Central" according to what ever feels most appropriate (and taking on board Oggwyn's point that Town Centre might feel right for Shrewsbury)? I don't think this would be confusing, though if you have a reason to need consistency of terminology please let us know

[Conrad]

Ah the joys of overlapping posts

How do others feel on this? I guess technically I have no problem with optional terminologies as suggested by Old Blue. But we would have to not have arguments about which to use, and avoid having an area for Bristol Town, Bristol Town Centre and Bristol Central (as an example, I realise it is a City really).

[Farway]

Like it so far, I have been having a tinker with adding Old Portsmouth [yep Conrad, at last] & Widley

But something seems to have gone wrong, me I think, so for the moment I have ceased adding and will revisit the method and try later

The two new Portsmouth areas I set up do not appear, do they need approval first?

[Dave M]

The two new Portsmouth areas I set up do not appear, do they need approval first?

Yes, they do need approval and as you can imagine it is being played with a fair bit. I'll get round to yours later this afternoon - it'll be good to see Old Portsmouth in the system in a sensible way finally!

[Farway]

Yes, they do need approval and as you can imagine it is being played with a fair bit. I'll get round to yours later this afternoon - it'll be good to see Old Portsmouth in the system in a sensible way finally!

Thanks Dave, I will not do anymore until approval is completed, Oh, I have just chucked in Cowplain under Waterlooville Postal