I had some time to replace the embedded Street Views with static Street Views for episodes 2 and 3 today.

I’ve also removed some superfluous text and Street Views as I feel they weren’t that important to the description of the location in question. I think it makes that part of the episode more understandable and provides greater clarity.

After the post where I performed testing of static Street View images, I set about replacing the occasionally non-functioning embedded Street Views with static Street View images.

I’m happy to report that they all load fine and very quickly. The whole of Episode 1 has been done and loading time has indeed been vastly improved.

I think I will make the image a clickable link so that a reader can launch the Street View of that location in another browser tab.

I’ve spent some time today on updating the map so that nearly all known locations have been marked in one central place. It now looks like this:

Visit the Map page for an interactive version of this map. Click on the blue pins to show a popup with a small description of that location.

I have now uploaded many of the photos and videos I took whilst on holiday earlier this year. There are quite a few photos I haven’t posted on the Facebook page, so be sure to check out the episode pages again.

The videos are the same ones I posted on the YouTube channel – I have embedded them into the relevant episode pages.

I hope you enjoy them.

We’ve just returned from holiday in Elounda for the last two weeks. I took the opportunity to hire a car and visit many of the locations I have noted down in the website.

Whilst doing so, I took quite a few videos, and in order to embed them into the site I’ve found it easier to create a YouTube channel to upload them all into and link to from the site.

The channel link is here if you’d prefer to access it directly. I will be uploading all videos slowly, as time permits.

In addition, if you have not visited the Facebook group yet, please do. I have uploaded some location photos from this holiday and will continue to do so. The group link is here.

What’s been concerning me for a long while now is the increasing amount of Street Views not loading throughout the site, which obviously denies readers the chance to see the location in question and makes various parts of the site look broken. I can only put this down to an increase in Street Views within each web page which subsequently increases the amount of calls the webpage is making to Google’s servers. This then causes a problem in that some views completely refuse to load.

Google has a solution however – it has the ability to provide a static image of the location in question instead of embedding a movable Street View pane. This obviously means that the Street View location in the website is not movable, however there are two advantages:

1. The reliability of the Street View image loading is greatly increased
2. The speed of the webpage loading is greatly increased

By adding these Street Views as images, they can also be made to be clickable objects, so that if the image is clicked, it’ll open the actual movable Street View in a separate browser window or tab.

An example of my testing is here.

I am looking forward to making this improvement, but it will take some time to go through the whole site and change all the Street View links unfortunately. I just hope all page elements load and there are no more missing views.

Recently, I’ve been on a search to find an ancient Greek-style typeface similar to the one used for the album cover.

I’m pleased to say I’ve found a very good match. The font is called “Pirho Herakles” and can be downloaded from here for free. Here’s some sample text:

I think you’ll agree it’s an excellent match.

I’m also looking for the typeface that was used in the title captions and the logo for the serial:

If you do happen to come across it, please let me know using the comments facility or the Contact page.

A short while after the problems with embedded Street Views, the problem was reported to Google engineering. They reverted whatever change they’d made and now Street Views should be working again.

As an aside, I’ve been working on two other locations websites similar to this one. I made good progress on The Lotus Eaters Locations page, and also created a site for the first Mad Max film. If you have an interest, go check them out.

The Lotus Eaters locations page will require more work – there are a lot of places yet to find (as it’s a 2-season series), and I will also need to go through each episode again to write up the storylines and document all exterior locations.

The Mad Max website however is largely complete. This will need another run-through in order to put more screenshots into it, however it contains pretty much all of the locations everyone’s found for it.

Hi all. Just a short note to say that Google are having a global problem with Google Street View at the moment.

For the time being, you will see a map of Earth. Once this is fixed, the Street View should re-appear.

Apologies for the inconvenience – hopefully Google will fix this problem soon.

In Episode 4, Annika takes Haldane to Dafnai to show him where she grew up. Last stop on their walk through the village before lunch is the house where Annika was born. They stand in the alleyway beside the house and in the screenshot below you can see Agia Triada in the background.

From looking around Google Maps, it looks like the below pin could be the spot where they were stood.

From using Google Earth Pro, you can see that it’s possible to mimic the angle in the screenshot above. This shows the church in the background in the right position, with the dome and smaller dome both visible, also in the correct position:

This will need an on-site visit to confirm, however from studying the village from above, the layout of the surroundings looks very similar indeed.