Next ACD
Posted: Wed 3rd Sep 2025 04:32 pm
For some time now I've been working on a new version of the ACD. It's nowhere near ready yet but it's making progress. Reading posts on here about old coffeeshops has given me extra motivation as shop history is an important part of the changes.
The main objectives are twofold: to fix the way that shop history is handled and to drop the tabs.
Shop History
At the same time as I was launching the ACD in 1998, a shop in Amsterdam was changing hands. Lucky Mothers was transforming into Het Kruydenhuys. I covered this by creating a new record for Kruydenhuys and leaving the Lucky Mothers one in place.
As time went on, more shops changed their names and/or ownership. Rather than creating new records for these, I decided to simply change their names and add a note saying "formerly ...". This saved some space (which was very restricted in those early days) and reflected the way that a coffeeshop licence was permanently attached to a specific address. So, for instance, as De Kuil gradually morphed into 420 Café, the filename of its page remained as "kuil.html" but its name changed to "420 Café (formerly De Kuil)". This meant that all existing links to kuil.html continued to work. Search engines didn't update themselves so frequently in those days and this preserved continuity.
Over the years I've come to regret that decision. We now have silly situations like Hunter's West having a filename of Heath.html because a few decades and many name changes ago, it was once called Heath Cliff.
I've wanted to do something about this for a long time but it's always been a daunting task to restructure the whole site. Now I'm grasping the nettle and working on the transformation.
For the first stage I'm creating separate pages for each incarnation of each shop with links between them. Each page will have a history list on it linking to all of the other incarnations. The new pages will have file names based on the names that the shops had at the time. There will then be mechanisms to redirect links from the old pages to the new ones. All of the index pages will be changed appropriately and so on.
Once the new structure is in place I'll continue the process by linking old menus to the correct shops and attempting to divide up the shop reviews and forum reviews so that they are also linked to the appropriate incarnation of the shop. Finally I hope to add lots of pictures from my archive to the historical shops.
Tabs
There was a time in the past when I became concerned about how long some of the shop pages were taking to load. Google maps and streetviews could cause delays, forum reviews had to be loaded from a different server at that time and so did menus from FBN's site.
My solution to this was to divide the pages over a set of tabs (those buttons across the top saying General Info, Reviews+Forum, Local Maps, Outside View, etc.). This meant that the first tab, containing basic details and a single picture would pop up very quickly.
The world has moved on a lot since then. Browsers have become more efficient in how they load components, most aspects of the Internet have got faster and both the forums and FBN's site are now on the same server as the ACD. So, the next version of the ACD will have a single page for each incarnation of a shop. I'll redesign the layout to make this work.
The main objectives are twofold: to fix the way that shop history is handled and to drop the tabs.
Shop History
At the same time as I was launching the ACD in 1998, a shop in Amsterdam was changing hands. Lucky Mothers was transforming into Het Kruydenhuys. I covered this by creating a new record for Kruydenhuys and leaving the Lucky Mothers one in place.
As time went on, more shops changed their names and/or ownership. Rather than creating new records for these, I decided to simply change their names and add a note saying "formerly ...". This saved some space (which was very restricted in those early days) and reflected the way that a coffeeshop licence was permanently attached to a specific address. So, for instance, as De Kuil gradually morphed into 420 Café, the filename of its page remained as "kuil.html" but its name changed to "420 Café (formerly De Kuil)". This meant that all existing links to kuil.html continued to work. Search engines didn't update themselves so frequently in those days and this preserved continuity.
Over the years I've come to regret that decision. We now have silly situations like Hunter's West having a filename of Heath.html because a few decades and many name changes ago, it was once called Heath Cliff.
I've wanted to do something about this for a long time but it's always been a daunting task to restructure the whole site. Now I'm grasping the nettle and working on the transformation.
For the first stage I'm creating separate pages for each incarnation of each shop with links between them. Each page will have a history list on it linking to all of the other incarnations. The new pages will have file names based on the names that the shops had at the time. There will then be mechanisms to redirect links from the old pages to the new ones. All of the index pages will be changed appropriately and so on.
Once the new structure is in place I'll continue the process by linking old menus to the correct shops and attempting to divide up the shop reviews and forum reviews so that they are also linked to the appropriate incarnation of the shop. Finally I hope to add lots of pictures from my archive to the historical shops.
Tabs
There was a time in the past when I became concerned about how long some of the shop pages were taking to load. Google maps and streetviews could cause delays, forum reviews had to be loaded from a different server at that time and so did menus from FBN's site.
My solution to this was to divide the pages over a set of tabs (those buttons across the top saying General Info, Reviews+Forum, Local Maps, Outside View, etc.). This meant that the first tab, containing basic details and a single picture would pop up very quickly.
The world has moved on a lot since then. Browsers have become more efficient in how they load components, most aspects of the Internet have got faster and both the forums and FBN's site are now on the same server as the ACD. So, the next version of the ACD will have a single page for each incarnation of a shop. I'll redesign the layout to make this work.
if I was anyway capable I would offer my help. I’m struggling to keep up with the tech 
so maybe I’ll stick to posting Coffeeshops menus 