Following user feedback over the last few weeks, we’ve been working on a number of changes to the Product Recalls website. These changes were pushed out to the server yesterday, so let us know what you think.
Categorisation
This was a big request from the early users of the website and something we wanted to bring in as soon as we could. We currently have over 380 recalls stored in the database, and each week this grows by around 40. This means there are over 38 pages of notices to go through and leads to some quite hefty emails going out. As it stands, people who sign up get sent every recall we find – not everyone is interested in angle grinders or laser pointers.
Today’s website brings in full categorisation. You can now browse through recalls for a particular category, for example clothing, motor cars, or gas appliances. When you search for an item, this can be filtered by category. Each category comes with its own RSS feed so you can subscribe to the updates that interest you. Also, it’s now possible to filter the email alerts you receive. Just select the category from the options on the sign up form. For example, if you just want to be notified about toys, then that is all we will send you.
To give you some idea of the state of the database – toys & other children’s equipment make up just under a third of the database, and clothing & fashion items take up about 25% of the website.
Improved Import Script
We’ve also made a few changes to the way the import script works. This allows us to detect when items are removed from the EC website. While we do not follow their practice of removing them from the site, we will be marking with them a ‘removed’ tag.
Other Tweaks
There are a few other tweaks around the website, such as the addition of pagination to searches, increasing the number of items in the RSS feeds and adding social media sharing buttons to the recall item pages. Hopefully these will help make the site easier and more useful to use.
Open Sourced Code
Finally, we’ve now open sourced the code for the website. This means that you can download the code to power your own projects. This is an important step for us and marks the first piece of work to be open sourced.
To get the code, just pop along to our Github repository. If you use the code, let us know – we’d love to see what you do with it!
As always, we appreciate all comments, so please take a look at the updated site and let us know what you think.
