6 May - Out with the old, in with the new
I’m afraid there is not much going on and who wants to read a blog on such a sunny bank holiday weekend anyway?
In
two week’s time west bound
North Kent line trains will use three different
terminal stations, something that they have not done for nearly thirty years when the Victoria services disappeared. There was, believe it or not,
a time when train operating companies knew what those funny things called points were for.
This weekend Southeastern had a surprise in store for train enthusiasts. A
direct train service through Abbey Wood, Slade Green, Crayford and on to
Orpington. If that was a regular service I might use it quite often. Driving
there is not a lot of fun. Is any route now that council road planners have had their way?
Another batch of Abbey Wood Crossrail pictures has been released today. There is
not a lot very obviously going on. More signage, lighting on the stairs and
construction of the new station car park. So small one wonders what use it will be.
Across the road on the flyover Bexley Council is still
pressing on with new
footways and before long the bus and cycle shelters with planned completion just
in time for the first Elizabeth Line trains.
Crossrail was not as generous with money as had been expected which will
impact the final design. Gone are the fancy bespoke bus shelters and the probability
is that something from TfL’s catalogue of bog-standard bus shelters will have to
do; well as long as it keeps the wind and rain away.
The old bus shelter is still on course to be a two level bike shed.
Lesnes Abbey
was looking particularly splendid yesterday.
Abbey Good Coffee
was proving popular but there weren’t very many people around the rest of the park.
The family group that had erected a small tent in the Monk’s Garden would probably incur the wrath of some Council jobsworth.
The Lodge has a couple of CCTV recordings signs on it. You would think that
Bexley Council would know the rules on businesses and the like using CCTV. It’s
easy enough to look up on
the Information Commissioner’s website.
Where are Bexley Council’s name and contact details?
Legally compliant CCTV warning notice shown. Click link to buy one.
This will be the last day on which you will see Bonkers in its current format,
tomorrow the new design will go live. The two are not very different in
appearance, the design goal was to make it infinitely scalable to make life
easier for mobile phone users not to change it beyond all recognition. It seems
to be OK on my small mobile phone and on dual Ultra HD screens.
All the present content will remain; to weed out the old stuff would create
hundreds of broken links but quite a lot of it will no longer be available via
the menu. The present (javascript) menu has grown far to big and the new (pure
html) minimalist one will be expanded very cautiously.
A few facilities have gone notably the ability to choose the preferred font
size. That may come back but not yet so meanwhile the default text size has been slightly increased.
While the update is in progress Bonkers will look a bit of a mess
For the nerdy…
All the pages that provide the text and pictures which you see on screen will be
left in situ but there are more than 500 files which dictate what appears
there and how they look. Things like colours, text size and whose head and which
Quick Link icons appears on what sort of page. There are more than there used to
be and the majority of the old ones have been changed.
The first step will be to upload the 500
support files to the existing live website and
overwrite most of the old ones. Bonkers will fall apart because the old style
pages either won’t find the files or not understand them and therefore not know
where to place things on screen.
There are 13 fundamentally different types of pages on Bonkers and some have minor variants
making 22 in total.
22 different scripts will be run which will find their relevant file type and
amend them all sometimes several thousands and sometimes only a handful.
The blog file script is biggest and will be run first. When it has done its
business all the blogs should take their new shape. In no particular order the remaining 21 file types
will be given the same treatment and become readable again.
Finally another script will be run which will remove any files no longer needed.
I can only guess at how long it will all take, something between one and two
hours I would think.
Things won’t be perfect, old pages will not position images correctly if the
browser page is wider than 960 pixels - the old fixed format. However another
script should hunt down nearly every occurrence and put most of them right.
Remaining problem areas can only be corrected one by one as they are noticed.
From Monday 7th May images will be provided at twice the current resolution so
that they can be stretched to a greater width before pixelating, a compromise
between quality and download speed.
All complaints to the usual place. Did I remember to test the Contact page? Yes I think so.