Packard Forum Index » General

Translating what Kev's done "...Just did the mass import. 2380 dealers now in the list..." and the potential noted by Dave "....I've heard it said by folks....there are probably about 10,000 distinct entities." it seems the Packard Owner's Registry has some serious catching up to do.

Kev. What a fantastic reference work. I have two work benches from the S.J. Hill Packard dealership in Port Arthur, Ontario. The business closed in the early 1990's and the building torn down to by replaced by a strip mall. S.J. Hill ws also an AMC and International Harvester dealer. They sold Packard right up until at least 1956.

Dave,

You have a little piece of dealer history there in those workbenches!


I was playing around with the Google Map API a little bit more. Now when you zoom down to the street level, you can click on any street that has Street View data and the map will switch to the Street View view. For example here in a screen shot of the Dealer in Dayton Ohio:

Attach file:

---

  (50.36 KB)

Thanks to those folks that have been added Historical Information and additional information the the Dealers in the list. I hope to have another wave of dealers added to the list in the next month or so. Also I plan on some additional upgrades and functionality to the list and the mapping.

Thanks!

I made a couple of updates to the Dealer List. Now it will dynamically draw the map based on the current information in the database. So when you add a new dealer and refresh the list, it will now appear on the map.

Also I color coded the map.

Blue = Dealers
Yellow = Distributors
Red = PMCC (Corporate Buildings)

This makes it a easy to pick out the Distributors in the sea of Dealers.

Thanks,

Shot of the week. East Grand Ave. The imagery here may be up to two years old.

Attach file:

---

  (85.37 KB)

Kev -

This sounds like a wonderful application of modern technology to the world of history, but I can't seem to get into the Packard Dealers section of the site now. The banner/header for that page loads, but after several minutes, my browser (IE8) stops responding.

Is the page now trying to load the map upon entry to that section? If so, that could be a problem for those of us on dial-up. Yet, without knowing for sure what the page is trying to do, I can't offer any suggestions.

I think the map is good but may be an issue for some. I'm on a fast connection and still waited 30-45 seconds for the map to pull up (waiting for something gstatic.com) and waiting for something else google. Also took another several seconds for the pins to populate in spurts. Once there & complete was fairly fast to zoom and move. Any way to make the map a display only if clicked type thing.

For me one of the great things about this site (compared to so many others with too many superfluous "bells and whistles" that just bog things down) has been its generally fast-loading pages. I attribute that to BigKev's minimal use of graphics - using thumbnails, instead, to save time. That way, a visitor only has to wait for a large file to load IF they want to see the full image. With PDF, BigKev has always provided the viewer with an on-screen recommendation to right-click and save the file to their own hard drive, then viewing it locally, to save time.

Would it be possible, then, to have the dealer list load as it did prior to the advent of the map function, but with some sort of static thumbnail or icon and link at top of the page, along with a warning WRT long load times? Mind you, I'm flying blind on this - just brainstorming.

BTW, as the Packard Owner Registry grows, I noticed that page taking a bit longer to load. That could become an issue as Mal keeps up his good work and the count grows into the thousands.

Interesting. If I open it in Safari it loads in about 2 seconds on my broadband connection. On the same connection under FireFox in takes about 10 seconds. I am sure IE is even worse.

So what I did was make a change so it loads a "static" version of the map when the page is first viewed. So this will make it fast for those not interested in the map. You can then click either on the map, or the provided link to switch to the Interactive Map Version of the Dealer list if you wish. So hopefully the best of both worlds.

Enjoy.