Motorwayservices.info goes back a very long way, in web terms. I originally created the site in 2005 just for the sake of playing around with some new (at the time) web development techniques, and decided to do a website on the theme of motorway services just because it seemed like a quintessentially geeky thing to do.
I had no real expectation that the site would be viewed by any more than a handful of people. But, to my surprise, it took off. It rapidly became the primary destination for people wanting to find information about motorway services areas. I became a regular contributor to radio shows whenever motorway services were in the news, and I was asked to write articles about motorway services for the media.
About seven or eight years ago, though, development on the site ground to a halt. I was more focussed on some of the other websites in my professional portfolio, and Motorwayservices.info ended up on the back burner. A few things stopped working, and I never got round to fixing them.
Every now and then, I'd have a look at the site and think I ought to update it. But I never really got round to it.
Until now.
Finally, though, my stack of circular tuits has amassed sufficiently to peruade me to revamp the site.
I did originally think I'd just fix some of the issues with the site as it was. But looking at the underlying code was like taking a walk round a museum. I originally wrote the site in 2005, and bits of the codebase from 2005 were still there.
Also, the ratings and photo uploads were among the things which had broken. So there have been no new ratings and no new photos since 2019. And the original photo management system was designed for the web of 2005, with heavily shrunk photos intended for low bandwidth viewers.
So, I decided to start again from scratch. The new site is a complete rewrite, with no code remaining from the original at all. I've also discarded all the original photos, as most of them were out of date anyway was well as being too small.
To give the redesigned site at least something to start with, I've used the Flickr API to find photos of motorway services that I can use. And I've seeded the initial ratings with a summarised version of the old data, just so that we've got something to show for most locations.
But now that the rating system and photo uploads work again, I'll phase out the legacy data as each service area builds a set of current data.
Because this is a completely new codebase, there are parts of the old site which haven't yet been replicated in the new one. The service area histories are being rewritten and will be put online once enough of that work has been completed to make it worth it. Some of the better old photos, once I've had a chance to review them properly, will be copied onto the new site.
The annual Motorway Services Burger Awards will be recreated once there's anough current data to make it work. I don't have any plans to bring back the old annual ratings.
The annual Motorway Services Burger Awards will be recreated once there's anough current data to make it work. I don't have any plans to bring back the old annual ratings.
Some of the data is still a little inconsistent. Although the total number of motorway service areas hasn't grown all that much since the site was last fully functional, there are some new ones that I've needed to add. And the data for them doesn't quite match the older data.
I also want to add some things that were never in the old site at all. Things like making the site installable as a web app on your phone, and adding location awareness so it can show you service areas near you. Back in 2005 this wasn't a thing at all, but it's routine now and I already use it on some of my other websites. And this seems like an obvious site for that.
Anyway, here's a couple of photos of me on a day when I had to go into the live link studio at BBC Hereford and Worcester twice in the same day to be on two different local BBC radio stations. The first was for the breakfast show at 6.30am, the second was a much more civilised time in the early evening for the drivetime show. You can tell that I hadn't really woken up for the first one 🙂
