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Quote:Brian,

An optimistic and futuristic view, good to see. Now if only those thousands out there will add their Packards to the Packard Owners's Registry and make it a reality! And when Kev adds the map feature to the Registry how good will that be? Just kidding.

I was thinking of adding a "Member Map" that would show you a map of the world with Pins were every Packard Info Member lives based upon his "Location" field from the User Profile.

But that can wait till after the holidays. I was up till about 4am last night(this morning) weeding my way through the Google Maps API. So I am a bit cross-eyed now.

Quote:

There's a way to speed up the connection of Firefox, which entails "tweaking" the settings a little. Basically, you go into a blank address bar and type in about:config
This lets you adjust all kinds of things.
Try this:

1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit Enter.
(Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.)

2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 10.

This means it will make 10 requests at once.

3. Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0";.(Zero)

This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages faster now.
Optionally (for even faster web browsing) here are some more options for your about:config (you might have to create some of these entries by Right Click -> New- > Interger or String

network.dns.disableIPv6: set "false"
"content.notify.backoffcount": set "5"; (Five)
"plugin.expose_full_path": set "true".
"ui.submenuDelay": set "0; (zero)


More tweaks like this can be found here: Firefox tweaks

I sped mine up a little, instead of ten requests mine makes more like 100. It's a LOT zippier than it was "out of the box".

Quote:Kev,

The "Member Map" is a great idea. But I've noticed not all PackardInfo members have specific locations in their User Profiles, is that a problem?
And, as usual, you've gone well beyond the call of duty to ensure the Site gets better and better.

Mal,

The code would take their "Location" information and try to Geocode it. Which means convert it to a Latitude and Longitude. If that fails, then it simply would skip that user. So basically only locations that could be Geocoded would be displayed on the map. All that is needed is this:

"City, State" in the US

"City, Province, Country" for Canada, UK, OZ

or

"City, Country" for every where else.

I wouldn't want anyone putting in a street address for privacy reasons.

Kev -

Thanks for making that change to the Packard Dealers page. It now loads in reasonable time for me, without locking up my browser, on my paltry dial-up connection. I suspect the load time for the page now has more to due with the list having grown to thousands of dealers.

I believe that the static map image will be just enough bait to get folks to look deeper. While I tend to think mainly in terms of U.S. dealers, I wasn't surprised to see a lot of points in Canada on that map, but the global presence is impressive.

I like the idea of expanding the map app to the member list and vehicle registry, though without need for street address/view.

All things in due time.

Here is a picture of the Nashville Packard store around 1940. The West End Avenue reference is the same location as referred to as Broadway in another post. That portion of Broadway had a name change.

The building is still there. I will try to get a recent picture if you want it.

http://digital.library.nashville.org/item/?CISOPTR=2259&CISOROOT=%2Fnr

Ray

G'day Ray,
to PackardInfo and for the link to the Nashville Packard dealer picture. If you could obtain a recent pic and post it here it would be most appreciated.

And if you have a Packard I invite you to include it in the Packard Owner's Registry here, together with a pic, any known history and how you acquired it.