bikebrain.co.uk - a tool to find cheap bike bits!
AndyT
bike kit stores... Wiggle, Merlin, UK Bike Store, Leisure Lakes, etc.
I've found it useful, and hope you will too. Any feedback
appreciated!
Unknown
Just tried it.
It's great! Will be brilliant for finding parts to build bikes,
replace components etc.
Comments:
1. wish there was something like this for other products too.
2. Maybe you'd like to post this on alt.mountain-bike too? I'm sure
the British users would really appreciate it? I think it's brilliant.
3. Which online stores do you include? Maybe then we could suggest
some that aren't on your search list?
Unknown
Is there any way I can make the font bigger? I try 'View -> Text Size
-> Larger' and nothing happens. There's a lot of white border around
the search results (of course this might depend on resolution, etc)
but it would be nice if the text was a bit larger. I'm still fairly
young too!
Unknown
>Is there any way I can make the font bigger? I try 'View -> Text Size
>-> Larger' and nothing happens. There's a lot of white border around
>the search results (of course this might depend on resolution, etc)
>but it would be nice if the text was a bit larger. I'm still fairly
>young too!
P.S. I don't mean to criticize. It's so useful as it is! I'm going to
enjoy using it.
Unknown
Just noticed a few other things:
1. Can I retrieve more than 100 results? Say I search for 'Cateye'. It
only brings back the first 100 results. If I try to be more specific
(eg 'EL 400'), it doesn't always appear in the list of results.
2. Somethings that 'should' appear on the list don't. For example
Wiggle sell the 'IRC Metro' (tyre) but if I search for 'IRC', it
doesn't appear. Does this mean out of stock?
Graham
"AndyT" <space...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:8a1b6fca.0310...@posting.google.com...
Initial trial seems to have worked. I will try it again to-morrow !
Graham
Pete Biggs
> I've built a tool which lets you find bike kit from a bunch of online
> bike kit stores... Wiggle, Merlin, UK Bike Store, Leisure Lakes, etc.
> I've found it useful, and hope you will too. Any feedback
> appreciated!
Good idea. Looks like it's got a long way to go though. It's missing a
lot. Site pages in the wrong format?
First couple of tests I tried.....
"Big One" turns up "itm big one road seatpin sjs cycles Ł34.99" -
but why no Wiggle or other prices? Same with "City Jet" (SJS no Wiggle),
even though plenty of other Wiggle items were found.
By the way, I think it's most important you clearly list all the companies
that are included in the searches on your site.
Please get Parker International, Settle, Oldham, Dyasons and Xpedia on
board. And please be careful with companies with out-of-date websites and
those advertising a load of items they never stock.
~PB
Nick Kew
at the keyboard of ouch <> wrote:
>>I've built a tool which lets you find bike kit from a bunch of online
>>bike kit stores... Wiggle, Merlin, UK Bike Store, Leisure Lakes, etc.
>>I've found it useful, and hope you will too. Any feedback
>>appreciated!
>>
>>http://www.bikebrain.co.uk/
>
> Is there any way I can make the font bigger? I try 'View -> Text Size
It might work better if you use the real address, which is
http://bikebrain.brainpipe.org/ . It certainly looks better in Lynx.
But I don't find it that useful. I don't want to search on a product name;
I need information on product function, eg
Nice LEDs my LBS was flogging at about £3 (great)
Brand name for ditto (well, I don't even know it)
--
Axis of Evil: Whose economy needs ever more wars?
Arms Exports $bn: USA 14.2, UK 5.1, vs France 1.5, Germany 0.8
(The Economist, July 2002)
Simon Brooke
I wrote a very snotty followup to this last night, looked at it,
thought I sounded just like Jobst Brandt, and decided not to send
it. The fellow obviously does have some use. I'll try to write a more
contructuve response here.
This is a website with a very interesting and I suspect very
sophisticated back end which is, presumably, analysing and extracting
data from the 'upstream' websites. But it is let down by poor
presentation.
The essential issue is a very common one in Web page design, which
results from the designer not fully understanding the nature of the
Web and still thinking he's designing for paper. It boils down, in this
case, to two major and one more minor problem.
The first and most important problem is fixed font sizes. They clearly
work for the designer using his browser on his screen, but he's
specified 11 pixel font heights and on my screen that translates to
under 2mm or about 5 point. Even someone very young with perfect
vision would struggle to read it.
The lesson is, never use absolute font heights on the Web, because
(i) You don't know what your user's screen resolution is, and
(ii) You don't know what your user's visual acuity is.
Your user will have set up his or her screen so that on normal pages
(s)he can read it. That means a font height of 100% is always going to
be readable. 80% is _probably_ going to be readable but not reliably
and you shouldn't use it for anything but 'small print'; anything less
than 80% is pretty much definitely going to be unreadable for some
users. And all fixed sizes are going to be unreadable for people with
poor eyesight or newer, higher resolution screens (and there's always
someone with a higher resolution screen than yours).
The second problem, considered generally, is mixing styling
information between the markup and the stylesheet. The markup should
just describe the logical content of the document, not what it looks
like. This is why using tables to lay out information which is not
inherently tabular is usually a mistake.
Using fixed widths for tables is fundamentally the same problem as
using fixed sizes for fonts. You don't know how big your user's screen
is, you don't know how big your user's window is, and you don't know
how good your user's visual acuity is. If you leave the browser to
sort out the allocation of screen real estate, 99% of the time it will
make an excellent job of it.
The final problem is that foreground colours have been specified
without background colours. This is fine provided that the user has
the white screen background the designer expected, but doesn't work on
my black screen background - I get tiny black text on a black
background, which isn't the easiest to read... The _best_ solution is
not to specify colours at all, at least for the main body, so that
your users get to use the colours they're most comfortable with. But
if you feel your colours matter to your design, then it's best to
specify both background and foreground colours.
I hope this is a useful critique. As I say, the site is interesting
and the back end is clearly clever - it's a shame the presentation
lets it down.
--
si...@jasmine.org.uk (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
Do not sail on uphill water.
- Bill Lee
Brendan Halpin
> The first and most important problem is fixed font sizes. They clearly
> work for the designer using his browser on his screen, but he's
> specified 11 pixel font heights and on my screen that translates to
> under 2mm or about 5 point. Even someone very young with perfect
> vision would struggle to read it.
Use Mozilla -- it will scale the "unscaleable" text too. I find
myself using ctrl-plus ctrl-plus to enlarge text on sites like this
so often, that I was very surprised to see yesterday that IE won't
scale up text with size specified in pixels.
Brendan
ObBike: brought car for repairs on Monday with bike on rack, got two extra
two-wheeled commutes in. Unfortunately picked it up last night, had
to bring the kids to school today (18km is too far for them to
cycle but I'm working on it).
--
Brendan Halpin, Department of Sociology, University of Limerick, Ireland
Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-390476; Room F2-025 x 3147
mailto:brendan...@ul.ie http://www.ul.ie/sociology/brendan.halpin.html
Colin Blackburn
> Simon Brooke <si...@jasmine.org.uk> writes:
>
>> The first and most important problem is fixed font sizes. They clearly
>> work for the designer using his browser on his screen, but he's
>> specified 11 pixel font heights and on my screen that translates to
>> under 2mm or about 5 point. Even someone very young with perfect
>> vision would struggle to read it.
>
> Use Mozilla -- it will scale the "unscaleable" text too.
If the site is to be useful it should render reasonably on most browsers.
Much as I'd prefer a world where people use better browsers than IE, they
don't. Having fixed font sizes is not a good idea.
Colin
Tony Raven
I tried it. I searched for a Race Face Aquanot jacket. It came back with
Wiggle at £109.99 as the only supplier. Wiggle's actual price for it on
their website is £79.99 and Chain Reaction do it down to £59.99.
So I tried something more widespread with Endura tights. It came back with
lots of Wiggle offerings but no-one else.
So until it copes with a better range of online retailers I think I'll stick
with a manual search using accumulated knowledge.
Tony
--
"If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything."
Mark Twain
Unknown
>Wiggle at £109.99 as the only supplier. Wiggle's actual price for it on
>their website is £79.99 and Chain Reaction do it down to £59.99.
>
>So I tried something more widespread with Endura tights. It came back with
>lots of Wiggle offerings but no-one else.
>
>So until it copes with a better range of online retailers I think I'll stick
>with a manual search using accumulated knowledge.
>
>Tony
After more searches, I agree with you on that.
Not quite what it seemed at first but a nice idea.
Simon Brooke
> Simon Brooke <si...@jasmine.org.uk> writes:
>
> > The first and most important problem is fixed font sizes. They clearly
> > work for the designer using his browser on his screen, but he's
> > specified 11 pixel font heights and on my screen that translates to
> > under 2mm or about 5 point. Even someone very young with perfect
> > vision would struggle to read it.
>
> Use Mozilla -- it will scale the "unscaleable" text too.
Oh G*D, sometimes I despair.
This is a _standard_. It exists to allow _interoperability_. Very
careful work has been done to ensure that well-written pages[1] will
work with _all_ users on _all_ standards-compliant browsers. Breaking
the standard so it won't work for all users is a mistake. Suggesting
changing the client-side browser to fix the broken server-side code is
the _wrong_ _answer_.
> I find
> myself using ctrl-plus ctrl-plus to enlarge text on sites like this
> so often, that I was very surprised to see yesterday that IE won't
> scale up text with size specified in pixels.
That's because (on this rare occasion) IE is right and Mozilla is
broken. Pixels mean pixels and the unit exists for those very rare
occasions when there is a good reason to address pixel sized things
directly. Specifying pixels when there isn't a good reason is a
mistake. Breaking the client so that you can't address pixel sized
things is another mistake.
[1] very, very rare on the real Web, of course. The standard of
'craftsmanship' and 'professionalism' in this industry makes me weep.
--
si...@jasmine.org.uk (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
;; I'll have a proper rant later, when I get the time.
Brendan Halpin
> Brendan Halpin <brendan...@ul.ie> writes:
>
> > Simon Brooke <si...@jasmine.org.uk> writes:
> >
> > Use Mozilla -- it will scale the "unscaleable" text too.
>
> This is a _standard_.
[...]
> That's because (on this rare occasion) IE is right and Mozilla is
> broken. Pixels mean pixels and the unit exists for those very rare
> occasions when there is a good reason to address pixel sized things
> directly. Specifying pixels when there isn't a good reason is a
> mistake. Breaking the client so that you can't address pixel sized
> things is another mistake.
It may be a standard, and there may be good reason that it exists,
but it is so often misused by web designers that were my browser to
respect it, my browsing experience would be seriously degraded.
From what I see skimming through web design advice sites, px is
recommended over pt is seen as "the right way to do it".
The pixel is also a pretty screwy unit to use if you want device
independence as well. Before we start considering devices like
printers or mobile phones, there is still a huge range in
resolutions of screens, and the physical size of a 10px character.
Brendan
Colin Blackburn
> From what I see skimming through web design advice sites, px is
> recommended over pt is seen as "the right way to do it".
The recommendation is to specify font-size in relative terms, ie
font-size: 90%; rather than absolute terms.
This way the browser can display fonts of different sizes based around its
default font size.
Colin
Brendan Halpin
> On 15 Oct 2003 14:49:06 +0100, Brendan Halpin <brendan...@ul.ie> wrote:
>
> > From what I see skimming through web design advice sites, px is
> > recommended over pt is seen as "the right way to do it".
>
> The recommendation is to specify font-size in relative terms, ie
> font-size: 90%; rather than absolute terms.
That was before the graphic-artist brigade moved from DTP to the
web -- relative sizing is anathema to them.
An example from www.basictips.com's page on CSS (first hit from
googling "px pt"):
When you specify a font size, specify it in pixels (px) not
points (pt) or em. Using a pt or em font-size property instead
of px allows for your site text to be resized according to the
viewer's system settings. If their system is set to view very
large text, your web site's layout will become distorted and
your web site may be illegible to them.
i.e. don't let the reader control his/her experience because
s/he'll muck up your pretty site!
Simon Brooke
> Colin Blackburn <colin.b...@durham.ac.uk> writes:
>
> > On 15 Oct 2003 14:49:06 +0100, Brendan Halpin <brendan...@ul.ie> wrote:
> >
> > > From what I see skimming through web design advice sites, px is
> > > recommended over pt is seen as "the right way to do it".
> >
> > The recommendation is to specify font-size in relative terms, ie
> > font-size: 90%; rather than absolute terms.
>
> That was before the graphic-artist brigade moved from DTP to the
> web -- relative sizing is anathema to them.
Yes, which is why websites designed by graphic artists never actually
work in practice.
> An example from www.basictips.com's page on CSS (first hit from
> googling "px pt"):
>
> When you specify a font size, specify it in pixels (px) not
> points (pt) or em.
Well, the fact that thee are idiots out there doesn't mean you have to
slavishly follow them.
Sorry, I get _very_ het up about this. I believe it matters.
Brendan Halpin
> Brendan Halpin <brendan...@ul.ie> writes:
>
> > Colin Blackburn <colin.b...@durham.ac.uk> writes:
> >
> > > On 15 Oct 2003 14:49:06 +0100, Brendan Halpin <brendan...@ul.ie> wrote:
> > >
> > > > From what I see skimming through web design advice sites, px is
> > > > recommended over pt is seen as "the right way to do it".
> > >
> > > The recommendation is to specify font-size in relative terms, ie
> > > font-size: 90%; rather than absolute terms.
> >
> > That was before the graphic-artist brigade moved from DTP to the
> > web -- relative sizing is anathema to them.
>
> Yes, which is why websites designed by graphic artists never actually
> work in practice.
>
> > An example from www.basictips.com's page on CSS (first hit from
> > googling "px pt"):
> >
> > When you specify a font size, specify it in pixels (px) not
> > points (pt) or em.
>
> Well, the fact that thee are idiots out there doesn't mean you have to
> slavishly follow them.
>
> Sorry, I get _very_ het up about this. I believe it matters.
I agree, it matters (and I agree in substance with your position,
largely, though I think it is important to push alternatives to IE
if only to avoid monoculture). If it didn't matter we would be a
right shower of idiots talking web stuff on u.r.c!
Brendan
PS: Out of interest, could you point me to where "it", i.e. the
standard, says px sizes shouldn't be resized -- I'd like to
understand the reasoning and applicability.
ObBike: 19 days waiting for an EBC mail order...Blackburn road
mirror and a DToplight. Maybe I'll get them before DST ends!
Simon Brooke
> I agree, it matters (and I agree in substance with your position,
> largely, though I think it is important to push alternatives to IE
> if only to avoid monoculture). If it didn't matter we would be a
> right shower of idiots talking web stuff on u.r.c!
No Microsoft anything on this box. Check the headers.
> Brendan
>
> PS: Out of interest, could you point me to where "it", i.e. the
> standard, says px sizes shouldn't be resized -- I'd like to
> understand the reasoning and applicability.
<q cite="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1#units">
The suggested reference pixel is the visual angle of one pixel on a
device with a pixel density of 90dpi and a distance from the reader
of an arm's length. For a nominal arm's length of 28 inches, the
visual angle is about 0.0227 degrees.
</q>
Exactly the same paragraph is found in the CSS2 document in section 4.3.2
AndyT
The site is still very much a prototype, and has only been in
existence for a week now... With feedback from users I can grow it
into something increasingly more useful.
New retailers will be being added regularly. Wiggle currently
predominates because they have the largest stock range - some 7500
items. Let me know of any other stores you'd like to see featured!
Thanks!
Unknown
>The site is still very much a prototype, and has only been in
>existence for a week now... With feedback from users I can grow it
>into something increasingly more useful.
>
>New retailers will be being added regularly. Wiggle currently
>predominates because they have the largest stock range - some 7500
>items. Let me know of any other stores you'd like to see featured!
>
>Thanks!
Great!
1. Parker International,
2. Settle,
3. Oldham,
4. Dyasons,
5. Xpedia.
were mentioned by Pete.
I would like to see:
1. Evans Cycles (not for their prices in particular but because I can
get to their shops fairly easily if needed)
2. Cycle Surgery (see above)
3. Merlin Cycles
4. Cycle Express
5. Gearshift
6. Halfords
There are probably more that I can't remember right now. Basically,
the more shops that Bikebrain can represent, the more useful the
engine, otherwise it's not that useful. Perhaps you could have a field
asking users for shops that aren't on the list, or for them to email
you with such shops?
Like somebody mentioned, it would also be very helpful to have a list
(maybe not on the results page but on another page) of the shops
searched.
I wonder whether it would be possible to have a more exhaustive search
syntax? For example I've tried searching for (Cateye's) EL400 front
light, using 'EL400' as the search word, then 'EL 400' but nothing
appears. Then if I try 'Cateye' I get 218 records but since the prices
only go to £6.99, my £24.00 light is definitely not there. Wiggle do
sell these (as do others) so it should be there.
Basically if you could show us what syntax to use for 'OR', etc, then
it could become more useful. For instance do we do: ("EL400", "EL
400") or perhaps is it: ("EL400" OR "EL 400") or maybe it's just
"EL400", "EL 400"?
Finally, it would be useful if you could allow the user to order their
results by any of the following: product name, price (current
default), category (currently not there), shop, etc. Maybe more, but I
can't think of them right now.
Anyway I hope you find these points constructive. At the moment that's
all I can think of but I can let you know more as I find out more.
Hope it helps. It could become really useful. Good work so far + good
luck!
panda
cool, will use again!
panda
Tim Hall
>Like somebody mentioned, it would also be very helpful to have a list
>(maybe not on the results page but on another page) of the shops
>searched.
>
It's on the about page (I think). It's certainly on there somewhere.
Tim
--
In space no one can eat ice cream
Unknown
>
>>Like somebody mentioned, it would also be very helpful to have a list
>>(maybe not on the results page but on another page) of the shops
>>searched.
>>
>It's on the about page (I think). It's certainly on there somewhere.
>
>Tim
Getcount returns an error and the other pages don't seem that relevant
to me.
I couldn't find it.
Tim Hall
You're not wrong.
It was there the other day.
I think the OP is still fiddling with it and has left something
undone.