|
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.
This was the 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 and in 2006 our new camcorder.
We added some basic search engine optimisation 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 site-wide RSS capability ready to launch a tourist news feed prior
to the 2008 UK tourist season. See our future
plans page for further website plans!
 Mike
Other Web Browsers
Our site uses web technologies such as JavaScript and CSS which should
run fine in all modern browsers. However, there are other web
browsers apart from Internet Explorer! We use a 'favicon' icon for
site identity which shows in IE when the site is saved in favourites, it
also shows in Netscape and Mozilla Firefox loads the favicon by
default. We suggest you try the fab Firefox
browser if you're using an old browser - it's free, fast and can be
customised with loads of browser extensions. We love it here at
micbinks!
View a pop window containing comprehensive
information about your browser and computer system.
|
Our Images
Our Video
Our Images
We carefully select, enhance and optimise all our tourist
and leisure images, displaying 10 to 18 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.
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 hope you enjoy our video clips!
You can e-mail us from here >
|
