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Updated
9th March, 2006
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This feature presents a selection of attractions within easy reach of South Oxfordshire
and which may deserve an expedition to visit.
Nearly all are within 40 miles of Blewbury.
Minor attractions are only included if much closer than that.
Provided your browser supports the "Tooltip" feature when you point at an item,
the maps provide an easy introduction to the attractions featured.
While care has been taken in collecting the data, mistakes can happen and we accept no responsibility for the use you make of the data.
The information includes an indication of opening days and times and of entrance fees. This is only an indication to help you select an attraction of interest. Entrance fees can vary as can opening times, and the attraction may be closed on some of the days indicated and open on others, particularly around bank holidays.
We would recommend that you check the information, for example with the organisation's web site or by phoning them, before visiting.
The attractions are grouped in sections.
The Buildings section covers stately homes, castles and other buildings where the building itself is a significant attraction. Such buildings are often surrounded by a pleasant park or grounds, which may be open at times when the building is not. Each building will have specified opening times and normally there is an entrance fee.
The Churches section identifies some of the particularly interesting religous buildings. A few of these have museums or other items of special interest, when there will be published opening times and a fee is charged. Most of these buildings are kept open most days, but it is not easy to discover when they will be open. A donation towards the upkeep of the building is usually voluntary but very welcome.
The Museums section covers those locations where the major feature of the attraction is the display of artifacts and other material illuminating the art, science, history and other aspects of the world. It includes mills and other buildings where the primary interest is the working machinery. Museums will have controlled opening times and some will charge a fee.
The Parks, Gardens and Countryside section provides ideas for fine days as these attractions are enjoyed in the open air. They include famous gardens, parks, and countryside features - including pre-historic sites, ancient ruins and other buildings normally viewed from outside. There are many public parks in town and countryside, so only a small selection has been included.
Zoos, Farms and Other Attractions covers all other attractions listed, including the display of exotic animals, farms showing selected farm animals, steam railways, leisure parks and scientific displays.
The maps provide an approximate indication of where each attraction is located.
Move the cursor over a symbol and with a suitable web browser you should see a short
description of the feature. Click the mouse button and you should be taken to the summary description.
The Oxford Map shows the location of those attractions in the centre of Oxford.
The Area Map on the same page covers an area of 100 km East-West and 110 km North-South.
A few of the attractions listed are outside this area.
The text for each attraction provides a reference to a square on one of the maps. Thus the entry for Claydon House with the reference Area Map Ref H22
will mean that the attraction is on the Area map in the square labelled H in the East-West direction
and labelled 22 in the North South direction.
These maps are not intended to provide directions to the attractions.
Directions can be obtained from the Multimap service,
and a suitable link is included with the short description for each attraction.
It is planned to enhance this feature over time. Please let us know of any inaccuracies you find. Also please suggest any additional attractions which we could add.
The source data for these pages is held in Excel Spreadsheets.
Excel is used to calculate data such as the distance and direction of the attraction from Blewbury,
and the Internet reference to retrieve an appropriate map from Multimap.
A master spreadsheet holds data on all the attractions, and then separate spreadsheets are used to
collect the data for each map. Much of the work required to create the final result is in adjusting
the positions of symbols so that they do not overlap each other or other figures.
The conversion from these spreadsheets to the web pages uses Microsoft Word in Mail Merge.
A Mail Merge document selects fields from the Excel files and included the data in an HTML output.
HTML is the text format used to create web pages. This HTML text is then cut and pasted into the web pages.
The maps in this feature have been generated from the UK Ordnance Survey grid references such as "SU552173".
These grid references are converted within Excel into pure X,Y co-ordinates measuring kilometres
on the Ordnance Survey Grid, in this case 455.2,117.3.
To create the map, Mail Merge is used to extract the data from Excel and convert it into
a standard eXtensible Markup Language (XML) data format.
XML is becoming very widely used as a general way of presenting data and transferring data between systems.
Different uses of the XML standard are developed for different purposes.
The particular XML standard being used for mapping here is Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).
This is a fairly new standard designed for displaying pictures and maps.
Browsers that accept SVG data are available, for example from Adobe.
However not everyone on Blewbury would wish to load such a browser,
so a suitable image generated by the SVG data is converted to a file format (GIF)
which can be held on simple web sites and displayed by normal browsers.
The tooltips and links are applied to the page displaying the GIF map image.
These were extracted from the same Excel source data again using Mail Merge, and
converted into the form required on web pages to control the standard tooltip and linkage
features of Web Browsers such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The Mozilla Firefox browser does not show
the tooltips, however it does aupport the linkage to the description of each feature. The maps are of limited use if
they are accessed by a browser which supports neither tooltips nor linkage.
This technological approach is chosen as it is available to most web designers.
Similar effects can be achieved with less manual operations by programs running on Internet servers,
but these are only appropriate to professional web sites at present.
The same master data is also used to create an occasional printed supplement for the Blewbury Bulletin.
This requires labels on the map to identify the attraction in the text.