SMP main page enhancement

What a great feature - especially when looking to activate a summit close to the edge of a region, it may be possible to activate an additional summit in the next region that is close by in the same trip. When only looking at one region, you might not realise that the summit in the neighbouring region is very close, so being able to simply click on the other region to see its summits is a very nice capability.

Ed.

Hi Rob,

Is there a way to disable this new feature permanently and only switch it on when needed?
It is great to have but it makes the map download terribly slow :sleeping: - at least with the Internet speed we have available at our QTHā€¦
I tried to disable it via the Layers control but I can only do so after the map has built up and the setting does not stay, i.e. I need to wait and do it every time I open the mapping project.

73, Sylvia OE5YYN

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Hi Sylvia - thanks for the heads-up: Iā€™ve started working on a solution to this problem, shouldnā€™t take too long :wink:

Rob

OK Sylvia - and any others out there who are interested in this feature - Iā€™ve now updated the code to permit the user to:

  • enable or disable the display of any nearby groups;
  • choose the extent in latitude/longitude (between 0.25 and 2.0 degrees) of any nearby groups to be displayed (the greater the extent, the more groups will be displayed if enabled). Neither of these options are saved in cookies, so would need to be set each time the page is refreshed. I try to keep use of cookies to an absolute minimum, but this policy may change soonā€¦

The above options are to be found in the main page settings dialog, which is opened by clicking on the ā€œSettingsā€¦ā€ button in the lower left-hand part of the page.

In addition, the (SMP-local) database structure and SQL codes have been altered to permit much faster loading of nearby regions when they are enabled.

Hope this helps,

Rob

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Itā€™s a great pity that you donā€™t run the WSPRnet GIS Rob. Their site has needed a makeover for many years and the SOTAmapping site is light-years ahead.

Richard, I take it you mean Map | WSPRnet ? I wasnā€™t aware of this site, but the page doesnā€™t look too bad to meā€¦

Hi Rob,

Thanks a lot for the prompt reaction and the solution to the problem!
Funnily enough, today, for the the first time, the map build-up was only a matter of a second :wink:

73, Sylvia

Youā€™re welcome!

Well, thatā€™s becauseā€¦

Thatā€™s actually the solution right there: the rest is just icing on the cake : ā€¦

Rob

Typical of me, didnā€™t read till the end of the answer :blush:
:clap::clap:
Much appreciated!

73, Sylvia

While on the subject of the Settings dialog in the main page, I noticed today that the options to set the Region box colors and opacities was also not working. So, for the 1.5 people in the world who actually use/used that option, itā€™s been fixed and is now working againā€¦ :grinning:

Rob

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Hi Rob,

Very neat. Very Timely. Iā€™m looking to activate a peak in VK3 in 8 days and one of my selection criteria is number of time activated.

Good work.

73
Ron
VK3AFW

Hi Ron - I suspect youā€™ve only read the first couple of posts in this thread, where the option to display summits as triangles or as activations-count circles was reported in December 2015. There are other, newer, goodies reported in the thread, tooā€¦:slight_smile:

Rob

Hi Rob,

Yes,

I saw an update and inadvertently went to the earlier post. Now whether I missed it at the time or itā€™s Alzheimers I donā€™t know but it was new to me and most timely. Yes iā€™ve seen the other improvements.

Donā€™t know where you find the time. Great work. Thanks.

73
Ron

Hi Rob,
Can you please consider making the new features (neighbouring regions etc) disabled by default and then have the user turn them on via the settings option, rather than the other way around. I for one find that most of the time I just want to see only the summits in the region that I am have selected. If I find I am near the edge of a region, then I may turn on the new features to see if there are any close by summits that I may want to include in a multi-summit activation trip.

Thanks Ed.

Hi Ed,

Sorry for the delay, been preparing myself mentally for the challenge of making deep changes to the main page code :cold_sweat:

Seriously though, I just couldnā€™t find the time to make the changes until now: a bad back this morning means unfortunately that I canā€™t do an activation today - especially for the Swiss event - so I thought Iā€™d attend to your request, which is a good one, and needs addressing.

However, I donā€™t think the display of the nearby regions should be disabled by default, but rather left as it is, but alterable/stored to a cookie via a single setting. The reason for this is quite simple - most users of the SMP do not use the various buttons put there for their use, have no idea that the Settings dialog exists, so would never think of using it to enable the nearby regions if they were disabled by default, thereby unwittingly depriving themselves of the opportunity of viewing them. Having them enabled by default is the only chance for such users to actually see them, and so on and so forthā€¦

So, Iā€™ve now attended to all the various settings in the main page Settings dialog (meaning they now do what they were supposed to do :blush: ). When this is used correctly, all settings are stored to cookies, and once a change has been so stored, the browser remembers that setting for 90 days. If you use different browsers, youā€™ll have to ā€œteachā€ each one what you want in the way of settings.

Therefore, to get what you want, refresh the page, go to the Settings dialog and make your changes. Next time you view the page, your settings will be applied from the values in the cookies.

HTH, 73,
Rob

Hi Rob, I just used the new feature and thought I would suggest that you put a Red text marker Flag up also when a user makes settings changes (like you have for the FILTER)ā€¦

Additionally,
I had been looking for a way to only display the summits that I havenā€™t done in a region. I had several great suggestions in a thread I started a week or so ago, but I thought Iā€™d ask you also.

Can you tie the Mapping to a call-sign and only show, the non-completed summits?

Thanks for all your efforts.

Richard.

Hi Richard,

The red ā€œFilter activeā€ text appears when a filter is applied to the data, which has the effect of reducing the number of results returned from a query. Thatā€™s why itā€™s so important to notify the user that the filter is active, otherwise he/she may wonder why results differ from those in, say, the SOTA database pages. That notification consists of two words, which take up very little screen space.

The other settings in the main page Settings dialog, on the other hand, do not reduce the number of results returned, but simply affect how data are presented graphically or in the table: so they can be considered to be of lesser importance than the filter. In any application like this - and especially a web-based application - there is often too little space available to present everything to the user. Thatā€™s what dialog windows are for: presenting sets of additional information, or controls, to the user to enable certain additional tasks to be performed without cluttering the main view.

Good GUI design is all about elegant use of screen space without over-taxing the userā€™s eye. So: no, Iā€™ll keep the Settings dialog - and itsā€™ settings - just the way they are, if you donā€™t mind.

Ah, would that I were able to do this! At the moment, I have no way to do so, and thatā€™s because your (and everybody elseā€™s) activations data are locked away in the SOTA database, to which I have no direct access. Understand that the SMP is a completely independent entity from the main SOTA sites, and runs on a completely different server, etc.

It would certainly be possible to use the new SOTA API to grab such data and thereby to tailor the display of summits in the SMP: on my side, itā€™s no exaggeration to say that I would need just a couple of hours to create the code to make that work. Unfortunately, the person in charge of the API appears to be so snowed under with other responsibilites that he can spare no time at all to develop the necessary functions to enable such a flow of data. And thatā€™s the state of play at the moment.

Of course, another possibility for the SMP to get relevant activations data does exist - and that is that the user him/herself upload those data to the SMP. It would then be in principle a simple matter to present ā€œnon-completedā€ summits, or whatever, on the map. But then I/the SMP run the risk of being inundated with streams of data, none of which can be guaranteed to be ā€œcleanā€.

The API is definitely the way to go here: if you and others are concerned enough about this matter, I would suggest you contact the MT and make your thoughts known to them. Perhaps some action regarding further development of the API might ensue; but I would suggest you not hold out too many hopes on that particular frontā€¦

Best regards and 73,
Rob

The recent changes you did to improve the performance have made big difference to me Rob.

I was sure there was a bug before too. When I turned off the neighbouring regions and other options leaving only the summit markers everything was fine till I swapped region from the dropdown and then the additional features Iā€™d turned off came back and slowed things down. The new code has fixed this, options stay the way you set them.

I was a bit ā€˜mehā€™ about the region borders till I actually used the facility. I grew up during the Cold War and never thought it would be possible to drive into Eastern Europe with a radio, climb up a hill and play radio. With the UK going to leave the EU, this will only get harder so now is the time to go East. Iā€™m off to Berlin for a work trip the 2nd week of October so I was looking to see which summits were nearby and the bordering regions feature is great for this. Itā€™s shown me that I can bag SP/OK & OM summits for not much more than the cost of fuel. What started as Iā€™ll take a day for SOTA after my work trip is turning into a week long tour of Central European SOTA summits. All thanks to how easy it is to see the regions! So this feature has gone from ā€˜mehā€™ to ā€˜yayā€™ :slight_smile:

I like that I get things the way like almost by default and donā€™t have to log in to get my UI choices selected. But there is one thing, can you disable the automatic zooming when changing region? If I zoom out to get a big picture overview Iā€™d like the zoom level to stay as I set it. Itā€™s not a big thing but itā€™s one of those would be nice options.

Hi Andy, glad you like these features.

On the subject of automatic zooming, this has already annoyed me on several occasions, and Iā€™d already thought of providing an option to enable/disable this. So thatā€™s definitely the next user-setting to be providedā€¦

IIRC, thereā€™s a similar feature already in the SMP alerts or spots page(s)ā€¦

EDIT: Yes, there were some bugs, but I think Iā€™ve got them zapped now.

Rob

RRā€¦TU de N2GBR