Gobbinland

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Gobbinland is in Oswaldtwistle and Gobbinland.com is a non-profit community site about this great place near Accrington in Lancashire. Gobbiners are folk who live there and Gobbins are the spirits of children and miners who died of starvation and who come out when Gobbiners are sleeping, creep into their dreams to protect and care for them, and generally make Gobbinland a great place to live.

An easily-navigated index of all Gobbinland

Aims of the site include: to photograph all Gobbinland as a snapshot in time for posterity; to index all the addresses so the website becomes an easy-to-navigate document; to build up a local history for as many addresses as possible that can be a basis for future history too; and to encourage an interest in the local community.

History Happens Now

As people grow older, many of them get more interested in history, especially local or family history, possibly when loved ones leave them or because they remember having more fun back then. They like to talk about the good old days and this is sometimes interesting and often boring for children (it was that way for me at least). I hope that Gobbinland.com will help bridge the gap between young and old in a few ways. Younger folk can learn how to take photographs by snapping Ossy streets and houses; older folk can add comments about what certain houses used to be like, who lived there, what they did in those days etc; school children could use it as part of a project; parents and children both could write tales, draw pictures or tell stories of Gobbins and Gobbinland both true and imaginary. By getting involved in a small way, all generations can learn from each other and gain a greater appreciation of history both in the past and as it is being made in the present.

Gobbinland on the map

Small businesses are offered a free web page to advertise the products or services in return for a link from a Facebook page, Google map reference or, if they have a website, a link from their site. The links into Gobbinland will give it a high profile in search engines thus giving the small businesses a higher profile as well. It benefits everyone to link this way and helps the town as a whole. The ultimate aim, I suppose, is for Gobbinland to be on the map, literally. It is a win-win situation for all who participate. As with most things, those who put most in get most out and there has to be positivity from enough people to keep the snowball rolling. It will happen.

Design features

Adi Mobile Textpattern Plugin

The site is designed in HTML5 and uses the wonderful Adi Mobile plugin. This allows different content for different screen widths, so for example, a mobile phone will receive smaller photos than a desktop computer thus saving bandwidth.

Faux Absolute Positioning for layout

Faux Absolute Positioning is, imho, a really good layout scheme, much less flaky than floats and easier to adapt to different screen sizes which is what we want with an adaptive layout. Gobbinland uses a default style common to all stylesheets, then a thin style suitable for mobile phones and then extras are added on top of that to suit iPhone, iPad and desktop. Adi_mobile detects screen size and delivers the appropriate content whilst some javascript delivers the appropriate stylesheets.