What's New
What's New on Histopolis - Q2 2011
We are actively improving and expanding the site. Here are some of the recent changes:
14 April 2011
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Surrounding States/Counties/Townships. A new map layer has been implemented for states, counties, and civil and survey townships to display the surrounding peer places (other states, counties, civil townships or survey townships). For example, a state will now have a layer that will display the states that surround that state.
The surrounding peer places are also listed in the "Details" section for the place with the relative direction of each peer place (e.g., N, NW, ...).
It make take a few days before the surrounding peers layer is available for all supported places.
2 April 2011
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Faster Page Loading. This release is focused on significantly reducing the time needed to transfer a page from Histopolis to your browser and initially display it.
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Place Navigation Revisited. The place navigation toolbar has been reimplemented and the functionality has been moved from the server to the browser with the following benefits:
- Interaction with the toolbar is VERY fast.
- Data needed for the toolbar was removed from the page content and is downloaded separately in pieces only as as needed. The page size is smaller making it transfer and display quicker and decreasing page generation overhead on the server. The toolbar data can be cached by your browser further speeding up subsequent requests for the same data.
- Initialization of the toolbar including loading any toolbar data initially required takes place after the rest of the page has loaded, further decreasing initial page load time.
The new toolbar is intended to function the same way as the previous toolbar. Please contact the webmaster if you notice any problems.
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Place Map Loading. Initialization of the map on "place" pages including the downloading on any data required for the map takes place after the rest of the page has loaded (just like the toolbar) decreasing the initial page load time. The rest of the page is available and ready to use much more quickly.
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Static Content Server. The mapping reimplementation released 19 March 2011 and the current toolbar reimplementation allowed us to separate the relatively static data needed to implement these functions and download it separately from the page content. This static content is now severed by a separate "cloud" server with very high bandwidth capability.
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Increased Bandwidth. We have increased the bandwidth to the main Histopolis server responsible for serving the nearly 4 million place, grave and surname pages now available on Histopolis.com.