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Our Website's History
Web Browsers
Our Website History
We originally started micbinks in 2001 as a means of
showing our UK leisure images to family and
friends spread throughout the world to avoid emailing lots of
pictures. Our original image galleries were constructed with
scrolling thumbnails along the bottom which could be clicked to display
a larger version, together with comments, above. For this reason
we created the site using frames.
Then we discovered the site being found and used by an
increasing number of people who were finding it useful for planning
their own UK leisure activities. We added the UK tourist links page during 2002 to
provide a resource of other websites we found useful during our own
research into UK leisure and touring activities.
From our 2003 leisure touring season we created the
image pages differently, placing around a dozen images on each page
with comments underneath. And from 2004, bearing in mind
increasing broadband usage, we edited our videos into longer clips.
Another 2004 addition was the commencement of our leisure product reviews,
starting with our PMR
taklie-walkie, then our handheld Sat
Nav receiver in 2005, a new camcorder
in 2006 and in 2008 our new digital
camera.
We added some basic search engine optimisation (SEO)
during 2005 to 'test the water' and found this had a marked effect in
the rankings. We also started the process of bringing the site
coding into line with current web standards.
In mid 2006 we ditched the earlier
layout style of scrolling thumbnails (see above) used for the 2001-2002
galleries, reworking these pages to bring them into line with the more
recent ones. This reduced the complexity of the site by using a
single frameset rather than the two framesets as previously. At
the same time we re-structured the site's sprawling directory structure.
Then at the end of 2007 we removed the framed style
completely and added a site-wide RSS
tourist news blog which we launched prior to
the 2008 UK tourist season. At the same time we added a UK tourism industry advertising facility.
At the beginning of 2009 we carried out some further
SEO, including a DMOZ submission (again) which was accepted this time,
resulting in a dramatic doubling of site visitors a short while
later! We finally got around to modernising the site style in
early 2010, ditching the heavy grey background pattern/yellow text
(likened to the sun trying to peak through on a dull day) for a soft
blue; creating an image of a clear blue sky and warm days - much more
appropriate for a tourism website! And we added a new feature
page about Geocaching. Current
website plans are on our future plans
page.
 Mike
Other Web Browsers
Our site uses web technologies such as JavaScript and
CSS which should run fine in all modern browsers. We use a
'favicon' icon for site identity, seen in the address bar and tabs in
modern browsers and when bookmarked. There are other web browsers
apart from Internet Explorer, we suggest you try the fab Firefox
browser - it's free, fast and can be customised with loads of
extensions. We love it here at micbinks!
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Our Images
Our Video
Our Images
We carefully select, enhance and optimise all our tourist and leisure images, displaying 10 to 20+
per page, with some of the larger image galleries spanning a number of
pages. Some short comments, sometimes amusing and often useful
for  our fellow UK tourists, are written under each
image. We also provide rollover text (alt text) for the benefit
of screen readers and to provide extra comments.
 Images in many of the older, pre 2002,
galleries are derived from video footage. As such the quality is
not as good as proper photographic or digital images, despite using
modern 'DV' format, as video is inherently a lower quality
medium. These images have received special attention during
enhancement. The source of later, post 2001 galleries is from our
35mm and digital stills cameras. All galleries post 2004 are
digitally derived. And from 2009 we've increased the size and
gone for a wider aspect ratio of our gallery images to better suit
today's larger, wider screen resolutions.
We hope you enjoy our UK leisure and tourist images!
 Belinda
Viewing Video
Our video clips are
in MPEG format and most are encoded at around 500kbps (kilobits per
second) in the interests of reasonably small file sizes. The
later, post 2004, clips contain longer running edited clips more suited
to broadband users. A video player or browser plug-in is required
to be installed on the PC, such as Windows Media Player
or QuickTime
or Real Player.
In the unlikely event you don't have one, you'll be prompted to
download and install when attempting to play the video.
Alternatively, we recommend the excellent IrfanView with
the multimedia video plug-ins installed.
Broadband users should be able to stream the clip
directly from our website. Slower connections may give trouble
with the newer (post 2004) clips which are longer and larger in file
size.
We've not added any more video content since 2006
pending a re-think in view of the abundance of online video now
available on the web. We're thinking of going the YouTube path.
We hope you enjoy our video clips!
You can email us from here >
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