Favourites

Or is that Favorites? Either way! I took a good tip from a good e-chum, Tony W who is the webmaster of the Mid Hants Railway's website at www.watercressline.org.uk who reckons one of the most important things for a website is that it should be "sticky". That's sticky in the sense of making sure the website sticks around so that previous visitors can easy find it again. One good way of doing this, according to "Mega Hits" Tony, is to encourage visitors to make your site one of their "Favorites" (or as I prefer "Favourites"), and thus easily found from the Favorites button fitted as standard to IE browsers (and similar functions can be found on other types of browsers, I gather). Hence, today, I added a little star symbol to the front page of www.wsr.org.uk and I hope it gives stick-appeal to the website.

Volunteers Page

Now and again, folks ask me to publicise an upcoming need for volunteers for a discrete project or task. Recently, a carriage caretaker has been needed at Chinnor, Bodmin and Buckfastleigh, and even a call for Santa has been broadcast on the news page of www.wsr.org.uk So when a chum suggested a more permanent web page for calls for volunteers, I came up with www.wsr.org.uk/vol.htm It seems important not to re-invent webpages and make good use of existing resources so the websites of WSRA, Rodney Greenway's WSR Volunteers and the Somerset & Dorset Railway Trust are given prominence. The chum also suggested perhaps project managers could upload details automatically, so I am looking at ways of doing this by modifying the lcoo roster scripts...

Wider pages

The width of most page content on the website is 800 pixels which is centred on the page. I'd like to move to a wider format - 1280 pixels - in due course. A few gallery pages are already at that width, and I think it really helps - unless your browser format cannot cope with a finer resolution than 800x600. In terms of going wider more generally, the snag is, of course, 99% of the web site is managed as static html pages so any change is a major task. But recently the timetables for the Somerset in Autumn event required around 15-16 columns for the train times, too many for the standard width. The timetables are dynamically generated using a couple of Perl scripts. So, a few tweeks today, and it's fixed! Where needed, the scripts now produce the standard or wider versions. Sorted.

Social Bookmarking

Eh? What's "Social Bookmarking"? Well, it's stuff like Facebook and Digg. So how can this help promote the WSR? Whilst browsing the www.bbc.co.uk website for local news, I notice the Beeb offer clickable links under each news item. When clicked, the details of the news page are sent to the relevant website. Users need to be a member of these free sites but then the details can be tagged and shared across each social network. OK, not an exact science but every little helps. I have added similar links - to Delicious, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Facebook - to the www.wsr.org.uk news page. Not for each news item but the whole page. I may add similar links to the Home Page too. Now to find out what I'm missing on Facebook - but I fear I am at least 40 years too old for all of that :-)

The Market Place

Not many brand new things on www.wsr.org.uk of late. Plenty of updated content - news and pictures - of course. A good bit of my time has been taken up with developing the West Somerset Railway Market Place. This is the brainchild of Robin White, Project Director of the Heritage Carriages Project run by the West Somerset Steam Railway Trust and aims to raise funds for the acquisition, restoration, storage, display and running of two full rakes of the best examples of GWR coaching. The new stock will complement the superbly restored GWR Sleeping Car now on display at Bishops Lydeard. The home page for the Market Place can be found at http://www.wssrt.co.uk/marketplace.htm So where does www.wsr.org.uk fit in? Well, the underpinning software, by GPix, requires PHP and a MySql database, and good old Freeola (webhosts for wsr.org.uk) provide both. So the "engine" for the Market Place sits on www.wsr.org.uk - for now!

Departures and Arrivals

Just added new informaton to the webcam pages showing the departure and arrival times at Bishops Lydeard for the current day to help folks work out if they are likely to see a train whilst viewing. I hope it is helpful.

Old Friends, Faraway Places

A new picture page feature for those pictures of locos that once graced WSR metals and now at work elsewhere. Also for pictures of faraway places which at the time had a topical or relevant link to the WSR. I'll have to be rather more selective than normal as I don't want this page (or my time) to be swamped by submissions of "off line" pictures (pun intended). The purpose of the website is to show the WSR to the world on the web and local content must come first. Nevertheless it is always nice to see old friends in faraway places...

Updating on the move

Although it may seem old hat to some Billy Whizz types, I was somewhat pleased to find how useful was the WiFi service on GNER the other day when I had a trip to Edinburgh for a meeting. No sooner had I turned the laptop on when, hey, I was invited to connect to "gnerwifi" and so I did. Suddenly the entire internet was open to me. I downloaded some images submitted by a couple of my faithful band of photographers, chopped 'em up into publishing formats and then updated the supporting caption files. A bit of news had also come in so I dealt with that page too. And then I thought, well, that saved me some time this evening when I get back at 9pm. Well, blow that, why not upload to the webserver - yes the FTP link hooked up OK and off the new content went via who knows where. A quick check and yes the new content is online. Emails via the browser seemed to be OK, so I did some "real" work too. Next trip on GNER, save a couple to London, is to Inverness...perhaps the website can stay up to date during that extended trip, especially as WiFi is available at the b&b too. Perhaps I'm beginning to become a Billy Whizz after all.

Picture Pages

Well, it took a bit more of a "tweak" but I have completed the scripts and can now an index page of the "Pic of the Week" images by year. Hopefully this will please those folks who have asked for that enhancement.

Progress elsewhere has been limited to making a start on the Images from 2007 page which will not go live until I have a few more (haven't taken them yet!).

It's all "images" these days - the other thing I need to release is the Picture Search page, which seems to work fine, except that I need to tart it up to the current page symbology standard.

Pic of the Week

This newish feature seems to be quite popular although I sometimes dread having to choose one photo over another. One person has requested a Pic of the Week index page and yes I do plan to introduce one. I need to tweak a Perl script to grab a years worth and render up a page, just like the Latest Pix page works. But when will I get the time...

A bit of bother

Just after lunch yesterday when the hard drive on the laptop decided to give up. So, the nice man at Dell said a new hard drive would arrive on Monday. If and when it arrives, a rebuild from scratch is on the cards so it'll be a day or two before the website is back in full update mode. Thankfully a full backup of data was made just a week ago. Most of the more recent updates have been Gala pictures on www.wsr.org.uk and I will need to drag these files back from the webserver. The hard drive also held the content for the WSRA website (www.wsra.org.uk) and the WSSRT website (www.wssrt.co.uk) and a number of other websites. Oh, fun and games...

After the Gala...

... a few hundred pictures arrive by email. So I'm a bit bogged down with resizing and thumbnailing and captioning and uploading. But there does seem to be a demand so that's great. Meantime a few great stories are breaking and I will break off to deal with those in the next day or so. Those who have submitted images, but not yet seen them online, please bear with me.

Wet Wet Wet

A call from Bishops Lydeard asking for help in asking visitors to the Gala to leave their cars at the Silk Mill Park and Ride and use the free heritage bus to and from the WSR station. Why the call? It seems the recent rains have transformed the two fields adjacent to the station into a lake or at best beavily waterlogged. The fields are used as for overspill parking during busy WSR events. Thus the need to alert visitors. So, I decided to add a whole new section on the front page about the Gala. This gives more prominence to the event itself and the chance to put the parking message up front. Hope it works. And dries out.

Not much going on...

or is there? Well, my time has been taken up with producing a leaflet map for a railway "up north" and a draft set of maps for the WSR rule book. I have also been working on a possible replacement Forum, which could, if suitable and if members want it to, replace the current Yahoo based group. Several chums have been testing the new phpBB/MySQl based software and I have just asked, publicly, for a few more. The fine tuning is not complete but I feel ready to open it up for some more testing. So perhaps no much visible output, well, not yet anyway...

To advertise or not

So far I have resisted any third party advertising on the site. I do get requests, not many, mostly from B&Bs, so there could be a small market to tap. Because many of the Railway's visitors need accommodation, I offer the "Where to Stay" page http://www.wsr.org.uk/stay.htm which lists quite a number of establishments and contact details, at no cost. Now I am re-considering. More efficient ways of serving up the website is costing me more - whether it is a fast FTP link for uploading the huge number of images now coming in, or investing in a server-based database, to enable easier content management. Oh, decisions, decisions.

Up and Down and Up

The website took a five hour break today when the webservers went a bit wonky. Being a Saturday I suspect they had to drag a techie back from a footie game or shopping or whatever. It just shows how we depend on the service provided by Freeola (our website hosts). I think they have provided great service for the last six-seven years so a short break in transmission can be forgiven. It'd be nice to have the "Potter's Wheel" or similar old fill-in shown to visitors whilst the techies sort the problem...

A look back...

Just added to the "About Us" page a list of links to www.archive.org each showing a snapshot of the wsr.org.uk website as it was. I have selected one example from each year from 2000. There's also a link to all snapshots of the website taken by archive.org over the years.

RSS for Latest Pix

I am close to finishing some work which will provide a RSS feed showing thumbnails of the latest ten images from the Latest Pictures page. The benefits here will be gained by those who use RSS feeds to alert of new content (in this case, new pictures). The Latest News RSS feed has been up and running for some time now http://www.wsr.org.uk/news.rss so this is the next logical step for the website as I aim to provide as much online coverage and access to WSR things as possible. If we get a single extra passenger then it's all worth it :)

And from phone to email...

...users can also send news by mobile phone to our email address, just key in:

mmail steve@wsr.org.uk your_message

remember the space between each of the three elements

and then send to +447747782320

Simple.

Text to Skype

Here is another way for folks to send us news items.

1 Start message like this skype wsrweb
2 then a space followed by your message eg London train arrived at NF
3 then send to +447747782320

This make use of the (free) Connectotel SMS to Skype service. Please note we do not use Skype for any other purpose eg phone calls

Cool eh :)

Ready Steady Cook

The website itself does not use cookies - those little files that are a pain or a blessing depending on what they do. Remembering a login name and password is one thing, but sending back information to a commercial company about what you do on your computer is quite another thing. Anyway, I have needed to better understand what pages are being visited. So in November last year I placed some code on the front page and news page which links to a statistics facility. Of course, it uses a cookie. The results have been quite useful. I now have a good idea of the numbers of unique visitors (on a daily basis) by correlation with my own simple incremental counter. And a better idea of what operating system and browser folks use - Windows XP and IE6/7 by a long chalk. The most useful stat is the screen resolution being used - which suggests the next major improvement to the website will be a page size of at least 1024 pixels wide. Back to the cookies. I plan to keep the statistics code for a few more weeks and then remove it. I will have sufficient information by then.

Bigger pictures are live...

As mentioned below, I have put the bigger picture pages on the live site. It's only for the set of eight pics from 2006 at the moment. Canny visitors will notice the pages if they visit the What's New page. There is a temporary link on the Gallery page too. The link to the previous 2006 page is still there. And, yes, I have swopped the pic of Nellie. OK I know these pages feature my own efforts but it's my site, so there! Seriously, I hope visitors will permit me a smidgen of self-indulgence.

A gallery page for "Braunton"

Spurred on by a set of fab images taken and sent in by Marcus Slade, I have created a page of pictures showing progress at Williton Shed as "Braunton" begins to take shape after a very long but hugely professional restoration. The page includes most of those of "Braunton" already on the website in various picture pages down the years. Let's hope tis not too long before the completed loco is revealed to the waiting world. Gonna be a good one.

Bigger pictures

Most pictures in the Gallery are now rendered at 512pixels on the longest side. This size is often an exact division of out-of-the-camera images and should give a reasonably faithfully sharp image when reduced.

However, I am also working on the Year-by-Year galleries, which are of my own WSR images, and well, being selfish, I'd like these to be bigger still! So these are 864pixels on the long side. Of course, users having broadband will be at an advantage when downloading these pages and also those having a screen resolution width of 1024 or more. I am not yet ready to release these pages but when I do I will add a "warning" to the gallery page.

Let's have a blog

Yes, let's have a blog, he thought. Why not. Everyone has one. Actually, I do already have a blog. It's called West Somerset Railway Tales and allows me to bung onto the web a few thoughts about WSR related things that I wouldn't always put on a newsgroup or on the website itself. So why another then? I thought I could use a blog to put things up about the website, such as new ideas, bad ideas, changes. Things about hits and traffic. Anyway, I'll give it a go and see what happens. Blogs away.