What's Going On At TillyOchil
If you check out TillyOchil from time to time you cannot have failed to have noticed that nothing much seems to be going on here.
In fact we haven't forgotten TillyOchil. Far from it.
We are working on turning it from the rather difficult-to-get-around blog into a proper web site.
We have assessed a number of ways of doing this and have decided to leave behind Wordpress, what we've been using to date, and move over to something called Drupal.
That means starting again more or less from scratch with this new-to-us system. Currently we're getting up to speed with it - it has huge potential but with a learning curve to match!
We've also looked into what we should use for maps and have decided that our initial idea of using Zoomify. We've failed to find a way to make the hotspots look OK on the initial map (see my Zoomify review) and so, I guess, have Zoomify themselves, because their own online examples suffer from the same problem. They have also failed to respond to my two emails to their support address asking whether there is a fix or workaround.
So we're going to use Google Maps instead. We'd have liked to have been able to use Multimap (now under Microsoft's Bing) instead because of their wonderful Ordnance Survey maps, but their terms and conditions preclude that for what we want to do.
I expect we'll link to them because the OS maps are so much more useful than the alternatives for finding your way and getting an idea of the terrain when not on a road. Just compare this map with this one of the same area.
Sure, you can switch on the satellite/aerial images with both and, at the time of writing, Google has better coverage on that front, but the first shows so much more information for anyone looking to see where they might find a good walk into the hills.
But we can't use them on our site, at least not with overlays such as showing the route of a walk.
Our intention is to roll out the new site once it is good enough to be useful, so we're hopeful that will be within the next couple of weeks.
In the meantime, watch this space!
