Jordan
TS Contributor
When I first built this, I posted this on TTF, but I've made some changes lately and I'd like to give it a mention again here 
If you've ever used the Staffordshire Moorlands Planning Portal, you'll know what a pain it can be to trawl through the planning applications for Alton Towers. It's slow, complicated, and in some web browsers it won't work at all. You can't always bookmark a page and be sure it will still work when you visit later, and I've found myself trawling through page after page of applications trying to find a particular one.
To make this a bit easier, a few months ago I built the website TowersPlans. It's really simple and presents each application in a way that makes it much easier to read. You can see the whole list on a single page, and you can filter them by whether they've been approved or not. I've also grouped quite a lot of the applications by the attractions they're about - so you can see the Secret Weapon 7 applications easier, or applications about The Towers.
The site works by pulling the data in from the planning portal every morning, so the site keeps itself up-to-date on a daily basis. I've recently made changes so that this will track the history of each application whenever there is a change, so you can now see a list of all the recent activity on the homepage, which should make it easier to spot new applications when they appear.
If you're a developer, there's also an API, so that you can pull in the latest applications into your own website without having to go through the hassle of querying the planning portal yourself.
In the future, I want to look at other ways in which the site can use the data - and being able to annotate applications with more information about what it relates to and where on the resort it is.
I'd really like to know what you think, and if there's anything that could be done to make it easier to use.
If you've ever used the Staffordshire Moorlands Planning Portal, you'll know what a pain it can be to trawl through the planning applications for Alton Towers. It's slow, complicated, and in some web browsers it won't work at all. You can't always bookmark a page and be sure it will still work when you visit later, and I've found myself trawling through page after page of applications trying to find a particular one.
To make this a bit easier, a few months ago I built the website TowersPlans. It's really simple and presents each application in a way that makes it much easier to read. You can see the whole list on a single page, and you can filter them by whether they've been approved or not. I've also grouped quite a lot of the applications by the attractions they're about - so you can see the Secret Weapon 7 applications easier, or applications about The Towers.
The site works by pulling the data in from the planning portal every morning, so the site keeps itself up-to-date on a daily basis. I've recently made changes so that this will track the history of each application whenever there is a change, so you can now see a list of all the recent activity on the homepage, which should make it easier to spot new applications when they appear.
If you're a developer, there's also an API, so that you can pull in the latest applications into your own website without having to go through the hassle of querying the planning portal yourself.
In the future, I want to look at other ways in which the site can use the data - and being able to annotate applications with more information about what it relates to and where on the resort it is.
I'd really like to know what you think, and if there's anything that could be done to make it easier to use.
