The historic home museum pages for Utah and Oklahoma have been updated.

Looking at some of the other pages I was noticing that most of the rating were averaging out to 3. I was surprised that houses like Hearst Castle were only rating as a 3, and were receiving the same ratings as some houses which I won’t name, that certainly aren’t on par with such masterpieces as Hearst Castle.

So I looked at the database the rating script uses and it’s apparent that the spiders that the search engines use are now smart enough to follow Javascript links and were voting. Even worse, although the script prevents a user from voting multiple times, it wasn’t preventing spiders from voting multiple times, and they were in fact voting five times, which accounted for the average of 3.

I’ve modified the scrip to include “nofollow” instructions which hopefully will keep the spiders from voting. I’ll keep and eye on it and see. If it doesn’t end up working, I’ll look for a different solution.

Just finished updating the house museum pages for Delaware and Georgia. I’ll be adding photos to these pages later, but I figured at this point I’d concentrate on getting the rest of the state pages updated to the new database format.

I’ve recently added the new pages for Alabama, Alaska and California to the house museum database. I’m still working on loading photos for the California page.

It took a full day to load the data for California. So if anyone wants to help reduce the burden, please contact me at info@vpa.org and I’ll let you know how you can help.

In addition to installing the blog software, I’ve also been busy working on a long overdue update to the Historic House Museum section. For a long time I’ve wanted to get the museum information into a database to make it easier to maintain. I’ve started working on the programming of it.

The biggest chore is going to be entering the existing data into the database. I’ve done two states so far, Alaska and Arkansas. You can take a look at those pages to see the new layout.

In addition to providing more complete address information, major new features include the ability to rank museums you’ve visited, and a small thumbnail of the museum.

Once all 50 states are done, there will be a search page added that will allow you to search by style or year built as well.

If you would like to pick a state and help with the conversion process, please contact Matt at the email address below.

Our webmaster Matt Knowles has installed a WordPress blog for the VPA web site. Members are invited to write articles, post photos or other content that would be of interest to our group.

In order to post content in the blog, you will need to be a current VPA member and you will need to register.

There are still some formatting issues to be worked out, but as more content is added these bugs will be fixed.