Saturday, 15 May 2010

NZ Rail Maps site changes and updates

I regret to say that a third article in a series about the Seasider is not coming soon. It is at the moment too difficult to juggle the limited amount of time I have for this hobby (at most 1 day a week) with the various interests I have within it. You should go and look at the web album referred to in previous posts and the previous two messages for content about the route of the Seasider. It is just a reality that I don’t have much time at all for rail interests except during the school holidays.
The site has been changed about a bit, the most obvious being that the original layout has been reverted to. This is that all of the files for a particular line, whether new or old, are in their own specific directory, and that the most current version of the file always has the same name. This means I don’t have to maintain a separate directory of files whose names never change for blog postings. A further change just executed today is that all previous versions have been renamed so that they will appear alphabetically lower on a page than current versions. This means all current versions always appear first in the page listing (as they have been changed to sort alphabetically).
Updates continue but are not being publicised specifically here. The major area of update of late has been the Otago area with 7 updates since my holiday at the beginning of April. Some of that relates to that holiday, obviously, and other improvements are relating to the Remnants series of articles. These are also halted at the moment, as they are big efforts that take a lot of time, and at the moment I have just about exhausted the list of lines that have the best GE and (especially) StreetView coverage.
I had hoped to recommend a change detection service for anyone who wants to have updates to the site automatically notified. It doesn’t look like that can be easily implemented at the moment because as it stands the banner ads on Trainweb pages will cause a change notification every time they are updated.