For some time I’ve been struggling with a problem with my Google Maps API - an error that will sometimes appear in Internet Explorer.

Anyway, I did some research yesterday and found a number of possible solutions. They all revolve around the idea that IE doesn’t like you displaying the map until the page has completed.

The three solutions I found were…

1. Load the map script using an onload event
2. Use the setTimeout javascript function to delay the execution of the code
3. Move the javascript to the end of the HTML

I used the third one and it now appears to have cured the problem. Hoorah!

XP SP3 is due to pop-up on Automatic Updates very soon.

In the meantime you can download it directly from Microsoft. This is the final, release version of the SP.

As well as rolling up past fixes, this adds new features ported from Vista and early reviewers suggest that it increases performance by up to 10%.

Me? I’m installing this as soon as possible. Who needs Vista?

After spending much time over the last couple of months looking at improving website performance I took the plunge and even bought a book on the subject - I find reading technical material in book form far easier than online.

Anyway, High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders is recommended.

Now that the plug is out of the way, I am happy to report that on a test version of the BMTG site, I’ve finally achieved my goal - the best YSlow score I’m likely to achieve - a grade B (88%). The remaining 12% is down to not having a CDN and due to Google Analytics not having an expires header. Anyway, this translates to a 19% increase in speed compared to the current site.

The current site (launched a couple of weeks ago) had massive improvements made to it but only achieved a grade D (64%) score. The previous version of the site was a grade F.

The changes I’ve made were those that weren’t covered by PHP Speedy - namely having an expires header for image files and turning off eTags. This was acheived by the following lines added to my .htaccess file…

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 6 months"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 6 months"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 6 months"
Header unset ETag
FileETag None

Released last Friday - yes I had it on the day of release - this is a superb game for the Wii. It comes with a steering wheel that a controller fits into. All keys are still easily accessible and you steer by simply turning the wheel in the air.

If you’ve played Mario Kart on the DS then you’ll know what to expect with regard to game play.

What makes this game so good though is how well this works. The steering and general movements is excellent. And the online play… wow. Playing against a load of people from around the world is a really superb experience.

Anyway, enough from me. I’m off for more motorbike action…

Streamline are officially rubbish. The BMTG site was a combination of slow or inoperative for about a week and all I got was messages that engineers were looking at it. Oh, and I couldn’t access the MySQL tables.

Thankfully, I use MySQL Tools to create regular backups on my home PC, so I used some of those to rebuild the tables at Memset. I also decided to rush out the version of the website that I was working on - I’m still testing this now even though it’s been live for a number of days.

The hard bit came when I found that Memset don’t allow domain transfers. Rather than keep the domain at Streamline, I decided to move it to 1&1. Their prices are also remarkable cheap. So, I moved the IPS TAG from Streamline to 1&1 (whilst still keeping the DNS pointing to Streamline). When that was done, I simply updated the DNS at 1&1 to Memset. If there was any downtime during all of this, it wasn’t very long at all.

And Memset hosting really flies… far better than it was ever at Streamline. In a word - “superb”. And free for charity hosting.

Before closing down the account at Streamline I asked, because of the issues we’d had, whether they’d consider (especially as this was a charity not-for-profit) refunding part of the remaining hosting fees. They ignored this request and simply closed it down. Nice.

I still have Artiss.co.uk (including this blog) hosted by Streamline, because I paid for 2 years hosting back in December. Unless anyone wants to donate some money, I can’t justify moving right now. Ironically, I wrote this blog offline a couple of days ago but have been unable to upload it due to my blog being down. Thanks to Streamline.