29th September. Time’s ticking by, and the site has really taken shape. Is it ready for the public? Can it survive the public scrutiny? Are the bugs ironed out?

Time will tell.

Either way, the site has been released at long last.

To give it a nice, memorable date, I spent the remaining 5 hours of Wednesday making sure everything was going smooth. The site was then uploaded, the database cleared of test data, and the countdown began – the idea being to initialise the site as close to midnight as possible. The site’s “birthday” then being 1st October 2009.

As I type, there are now 11 events. After hours of data inputting, I came across a rather serious dilemma. You see, Britain is divided into counties. These counties have changed over the years, some changed during another change. We are now left with some nice large, general counties, some sub-divided counties, some created to help the Post Office, others created to serve lieutenancies. The trouble here is that I don’t know which county sets to use. One idea is to use all of them, but different sources of information provide conflicting data on which county’s serve which purpose.

In the end, I didn’t see much harm in adding all county’s. Except when you try to find all towns/cities in, say, Wales, and the data there is different to how you know it. Take Swansea – it should go in the County of Swansea, yet Yahoo’s directory lists it under West Glamorgan. Which is correct depending on how you look at it, but will someone searching via county get the results they expect?

In an ideal world, people would be fully aware that Swansea (and County of Swansea) is in West Glamorgan, which is in turn, in Glamorgan – the original county. But will people select those? That’s not even the entire point – the point is, this is adding a complication to what should be a very quick way of getting information. If someone is trying to find Singleton Hospital, then one would assume they would select Swansea as a county. But in this case, the user would not find the event, as the event is listed under West Glamorgan.

So here comes the solution – parenting. County of Swansea is added as a child county to Mid Glamorgan, which is in turn a child county of Glamorgan. Selecting either in this relationship shows the necessary events. But this adds a problem that I, as an individual, am not going to know accurately about, say, Scottish county’s. Information online seems rather disagreeable too. A best guess is to take various maps of the county’s from different years, and compare positions.

Towns have also added a problem. Penarth, and Sully were added as towns. Yet an event in Sully is addressed as Penarth. This is apparently, correct. So now, there’s the problem that there is a lot of towns that are part of other towns. As far as I am aware, Sully is a rather small area and cannot really be regarded as a town.

As people add events, hopefully this will filter out which towns can be discarded. All I have learned from this is that Yahoo’s directory could be a bit sharper.