New MovieLandmarks Update

Movie Landmarks is back online. I think this is the 5th iteration of the project that I originally started back in 2006. It started out as a PHP app, morphed into a python wsgi application. It was always backed by a mysql db with lots of interactive features. For this redesign I've dropped all of that extra stuff and simplified things.

I threw out the database and replaced it with a couple of python dictionaries holding the landmark information and another with the movie data. I use Python to create the JSON and html files use for the site. This only needs to be run when I add new landmarks or movies.

The site now runs using Javascript to control the map and load the information pages. jQuery is used for the accordion on the left and Google Maps for the mapping. Clustering was one of the early features I wanted to implement, and I tried a variety of server side solutions but none of them worked as well as I liked. Google finally added clustering to their mapping API a couple years ago so that is what I am using now.

The site should run faster than previous implementations. Not being dependant on a database for its content allows the html to be easily cached using various methods. Currently I'm using cloudflare to speed things up.