myTobago – your questions, review and comment about Tobago

About my problems with the new site, which you can find back on the second page of this topic.

Steve, I owe you an apology for suggesting that your site only worked in IE. When you told me that you'd tested it on other browsers too, I looked into it some more. The actual problem was hard to track down, but I've worked it out now. Those interested can read on...

All my web browsing goes through a proxy server. One of the things the proxy does is some privacy filtering. For some reason (and I'm not completely sure why) your menus use some 1x1 gifs, dmb_i.gif and dmb_m.gif. Well, that was like a red rag to a bull. 1x1 gifs are almost always used as "web bugs", i.e. tracking devices, and my proxy server filtered them out. Once I'd turned off the web bug blocking for this site, it worked again.

I don't know if you want to do anything about this. It's a bit obscure, and it's not your fault either. On the other hand, I can't be the only person filtering out 1x1 gifs. Maybe using 2x1 gifs would help?

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the response. My ISP could well be a contributary factor(Freeserve) but it could simply be my impatience to get to each new page. Not to worry, I will just have to wait for the our exchange to be updated - BT have promised June. Ha! Next we'll get gas and a consistent electricity supply. Many parallels between Cornwall and Tobago actually, palm trees, frequent showers and torturously relaxed pace of life. Must be why I love them both.

At least I will have plenty of time to browse the new site while I count the days to my next trip. Thanks again and I trust you will have a great trip despite the exacting itinerary

Oh one more thing - who booked all the Excel premium economy seats for March 31st then? Very disappointed. Teach me to book earlier in future I suppose. Anyone travelling in premium on that flight look out for a grumpy s*d in cattle class glaring at you. Never mind, new plane by then???

Regards

Barry

Hi Stephen

You horrible man!!!!

Not wanting to make you feel guilty or anything but you've no idea how much time I've spent trying to reproduce that problem in different browsers and versions (14 at the last count).

The files you mention are spacer gifs used within the drop-down menu structure. Perfectly innocent, but as you might know, drop-down menus are effectively layered images, one over the other. Positioning them so that they appear as a seamless image is a pretty precise thing - hence the use of tiny spacers to 'shove' things along.

I appreciate what you are doing, but its a bit like blocking all email because some people use it to send spam. Virtually every designer - and certainly EVERY designer of graphic sites, has to use small spacer files. Yes, you might not notice the effects most of the time becuase nine times out of ten they only affect display. What's happening is that my scripts for the drop-downs is effectively 'crashing' because all the required components are not there. Sad to say, the time involved and my impending long visit to Tobago mean that I cannot offer to find a coding solution to the problem. As you say, just filter out 2pixel gifs.

My, I'll sleep a lot better tonight, particularly thinking of the four bottles of Stag I'm going to charge to your account.

Hi Barry

It wasn't me - if you'd said the return on 10th March, I might be guilty but on 31st March I will be hopefully relaxing at a villa on Mt.Irvine with two of my very oldest and closest friends who are joining us for the last two weeks.

By the way - the new aircraft is already operational I believe. I was in touch with Golden Caribbean last week regarding my excessive baggage requirements (Jill's make-up kit for 8 weeks weighs about 100 kilos) and asked about the new aircraft and their reply said that the new aircraft was in service and should be good.

Incidentally, if anyone travelling out on Thursday should see an old and bent bearded old fart struggling under the weight of laptops and cameras, please offer a hand.

There's a funny (????) story attached to this, actually...

I suffered a laptop failure last year, towards the end of our trip. The machine had about seven or eight new reviews on it plus the 1500-2000 digital photos I'd taken to illustrate the articles. You can imagine my language. Apart from that, Jill writes excursion/tour articles and we're always fighting over the machine, so this year we decided to play safe and take two machines. On top of that, I've indulged in a really top digital SLR so that I can hopefully illustrate rooms and stuff without bending all the verticals and lighting only half the room. Being clever, I decided to have a custom flight case built that would take the two laptops and cameras, in their padded bags. Great -but the bxxxxr weighs 33kg loaded (exceeding the 32kg that Health & Safety have decreed as the maximum that ground handlers should handle) and would be too big to get inside the boot (trunk) or back seats of the average rental car on Tobago. Also, nobody can guarantee the safety of the case or contents at Gatwick, in particular, so the advise was to take the gear on board as cabin luggage and send the trunk empty. What a parlava.

I've been lurking for about 4 months but just wanted to say a big thank you to Steve for the new website. It's amazing! So much information, I can't wait for our Honeymoon in April so we can see everything we've read about on here. Thanks for a brilliant site!

Barry wrote:Hi Steve,
Oh one more thing - who booked all the Excel premium economy seats for March 31st then? Very disappointed. Teach me to book earlier in future I suppose. Anyone travelling in premium on that flight look out for a grumpy s*d in cattle class glaring at you. Never mind, new plane by then???

Regards

Barry

Well, we booked two of them!
I'll give you a wave as I queue for the loo.

Well, we thought the old site was excellent, have used it extensively to research our holiday - but the new site is something else, - - - -
the navigation is simple, the photos are brilliant, just looking at them is making us drool at the thought that in just over 4 weeks time we shall be experience Tobago ourselves.
Steve, may we thank you for making the planning of our trip such a pleasant and simple task, enjoy your trip, you never know,we may bump into you while we are there, we will be in Castara between Feb 10th and 24th Feb.
Have a wonderful trip.

Sue B

finally us again...
it is hard to say, if and how much slower it is... TSTT is not so great, so if we have a lot of people online, everything gets slow anyway.... keep you informed if we detect a pattern...
(eggs or coffee, what shall I do until this is posted....)

Steve,Terriffic!!!I,I've got onto a fast machine in Tobago(MG Photos in The Mall Scarborough) and had a good browse.You are brilliant---this site must now be one of,if not THE best on the web.Congratulations
David

Steady on, old chap - us English are supposed to under-state things, not go over the top.

I believe you're there for some time. Are you still in Castara? If so, look out for me in a couple of days.

Hi Steve,

I was tempted to contact you offline to spare my blushes but decided to take it on the chin. I was finding it so difficult to use your new site that in frustration I decided to dig out a copy of Mozilla and compare it. Particularly as no-one else is suffering. Wow. It is downloading web pages four times more quickly that IE. My conclusion is that something is dragging down IE. I recently upgraded to SP2 so perhaps I need to fiddle with security/firewall/virus checker settings. Bottom line is, apologies for even daring to suggest that mytobago might be slow. It ain't - I am. If I solve this I will post it in case anyone else has problems.

Probably the wrong place but could you add this:

[Editor: Broken link removed]

to the birdwatching page if you think it is suitable - I found it very useful two years ago on my first trip. there are one or two holes but it does cover nearly all the species. I may stretch to a book this year. Any recommends anyone?

Regards

Barry

Barry wrote: in frustration I decided to dig out a copy of Mozilla and compare it. Particularly as no-one else is suffering. Wow. It is downloading web pages four times more quickly that IE.

Hi Steve and Barry

IMPORTANT NOTICE - I switched to Mozilla Firefox browser some months ago on the advice of my techie brother. Did this for two very good reasons that I will list so you don't miss out on the benefits:

1) Firefox CUTS OUT ALMOST ALL ADWARE ATTACKS and SPYWARE and VIRUSES (in my experience)

2) As a result, it's loads faster, simpler and cleaner than IE.

Just think, NO MORE POP-UPS. Quick page loading. AND (this is a sweet little extra) you can open new pages IN TABS.

I urge you to try it Steve (myTobago works perfectly in Mozilla) and recommend it to myTobago visitors who are suffering (as I was) with complete spyware, rogue dialler, pop-up, adware rubbish.

** The ONLY slight problem I get on other sites with Mozilla are I can't print my online bank statements (I reluctantly switch to IE for that) and occasionally some chat rooms don't work (who cares, but switching to IE works there too). That's some Java setting probably which I could probably tweak in Mozilla if I knew what I was doing... which of course, I don't.

Steve, have a great trip away - you deserve it. And if I may say the one truly world-changing thing I've learned from your site is that men with beards CAN have a wicked sense of humour.

I have Mozilla Firefox browser more than one year and it work perfectly.
No problems with viruses and adware attacks and spyware.
I recomend to all

we gotta convert everyone, Marko!

BTW - another thing that might convince people: last year I was forced by BT to pay several hundred pounds to for premium rate / foreign terminated internet calls... caused by rogue diallers sneaking in through Internet Explorer and then hi-jacking your PC and dialling their expensive numbers.

MOZILLA HAS CURED THIS PROBLEM

You won't believe the difference once you try it...

Well done!
I was stunned to see the new site pop up in front o' me eyes.
I'm definitely hooked on this site, and I'll tell me friends about it, too.

Steve,

Absolutely breathtaking - and I feel that I have so far only scratched the surface. I guess that I should be sleeping, as I've just got off the plane after the 9 hour flight back to UK, following 2 weeks of appalling weather in Tobago, and the new site is a fantastic view of the way it should be - and usually is. I was desperate to look at the site even whilst in Tobago, but poor dial-up services forced me to wait until my return,

You appear to have really put your heart and soul into this Steve, so I really hope that the sun shines for you. Tobago must (at least) owe you that!

Steve, Claire and Jack Fifield.

Hi Steve,

I am a new member but a regular visitor to the island. We fell in love with Tobago so much that we bought a house there nearly five years ago. We spend as much time there as work commitments in the UK allow.

You have designed a fantastic site; the definitive guide to the island. We recommend any visitors to our house to take a look at your site first for accurate up-to-date information before they travel.

Keep up the great work!