Map performance improved

If you've ever tried the "... more places" link over on the left of the page, I bet you've only tried it once. It was just about unuseable.

I'm pleased to say that the recent round of work in the boiler room has made it a lot better. I've just posted up the finished version, so I'll be grateful if you'll try it out and let me know if it works ok: "... more places". (It works fine in Internet Explorer 8, but it's still slower than I'd like. You'll get much better performance if you use FireFox.)

The idea for the old version was good - a map showing all the Places we've defined, so it's easy to check if a Place has already been created. And it worked well to start with, but got slower and slower as we added more Places. We've got over 1,200 Places defined now, which meant if it worked at all it was frustratingly slow.

The big change is that the new map uses a feature called 'clustering'. So instead of trying to show 50 markers in a tiny space, it shows one big marker with the number '50'. It's much faster for the computer to manage, and I think it's easier to use too.

If you find any problems, or have any questions, please leave me a comment below.

Regards,

David