Well I have been back for nearly three months from my trip to San Francisco, I did manage to get a bit of spotting in as the hotel was in the bay overlooking the approach. I'll put a few of the photographs in the Gallery when I get a chance, there was just the usual stuff arriving and departing at a busy International Airport. Although as the "Fleet Week" had just passed there was also some military stuff around, making for some reasonable spotting. Other places visited were the Hiller Museum which although quite small is well worth the visit, when you've been spotting for over 40 years it's not very often that you see eight new types in a day.

I've now got down to doing the specification for the database searches and other bits and pieces, the searches will be the first part implemented. But these should be quickly followed by other enhancements that will make complete the desired functionality, such as a personal log facility and an upload and download facility and quite a few others. Now in order to implement the functionality on the site I've had to extensively rewrite the way that the data is collected and processed, this has entailed creating a master copy of the database and tracking and updating only the changes.

Now to explain in detail how the searches will work and who will be allowed to view the data I have taken the following stance, only a registered member of the site will be allowed to access the searchable database. As I have some two million plus scrapes in the database and expect that figure to more than double by the time that I'm finished, I'm sure that you'll understand my reluctance to just make all the data available up front. The dataset was offered to commercial database providers some time ago, not for financial gain either. It was declined by both parties, so here we are with me giving access to the whole thing free.