Geospatial Portal v2.0

Around the end of each year I start going over some of my sites and applications with a critical eye. While my sense of style is consistently bad, over time it evolves in various (bad) ways. Often when I look at something I did six months ago that I thought was a work of art, a little time and a fresh (bad) perspective reveals it to be less Rembrandt and more road kill. If you know what I’m saying.

While spinning around in my chair recently, I caught a glimpse of Geospatial Portal from the corner of my eye. The British voice in my head that makes up my inner quality control division let loose with a “Say chap! That web site looks like something that came out of the business end of an incontinent yak, if you know what I’m saying. Bloody hell, you yanks wouldn’t know a….”, which continued for some time and ranged far afield, so I won’t bore you with the details.

After thinking about it, I decided it wasn’t all that bad, but there were some things I didn’t like. The map filling the screen bit wasn’t a bad idea, but since the search/data accordion covered up most of the left side, the user was fetching images that weren’t particularly useful. There was some absolute positioning and other layout uglies here and there, and I was using a mishmash of self-built stuff and various jQuery plugins.

Without further ado - BEHOLD! I GIVE YOU GEOSPATIAL PORTAL v2.0!

As usual, you can read about the changes and download the source code on the projects page.