In the interest of fairness...

...and to show my gratitude that someone from JiWire actually took the time to respond to my post yesterday, I spent a bit more time there this afternoon, playing around with their new hotspot finder.

I should point out that my initial impressions were based on my having hit the site yesterday from work, where sits a stone tablet brought down from some mountain somewhere inscribed: "Windows shalt be thy operating system and Internet Explorer thy browser, and neither shalt thou have nor hold any above them." Or something like that. Well, what the heck-it's their computer. Anyway, I was so used to being able to pull up that list of every country and state and its number of free hotspots, then click the state and see the cities listed with their numbers, that when I saw I apparently couldn't do that anymore...well, let's just say things went downhill emotionally for me from there. And between running into the browser compatibility issues the responder acknowledged as well as the connectivity issues I described below using my own laptop-upon which IE is strictly persona non grata-at Crown Center after work, I really didn't get much time to take a closer look at the site.

After having done so today, however, I can tell you that once you do manage to pull up a list of free hotspots within a state or city, it does appear that it is indeed just that-exclusively free hotspots with no paid ones mixed in. I believe it was in trying to pull up the number for the whole country (which also used to be broken out in a list) where I saw paid locations. By the way, when I tried this for the USA it pegged at "9999" even though I know there were 18,858 as of January 27.

But that's neither here nor there. As the responder pointed out, the new finder is a work in progress, and once it works properly with Firefox I'll still consider it an asset, even though the previous design was easier to use the way I did.

If I could make a suggestion, it'd be great if you could replicate the functionality of the old "Free Hotspots" button somehow. I thought that choosing the "Free" radio button on the advanced search page would do that, but it doesn't exactly. And if the map that likes to pop up over the page for some reason could be made to go away and stay away, that would be a godsend.

Once more, thanks for the quick response, and I hope I've set the record straight.