Going mobile

After some time designing and testing, a new West Somerset Railway website suitable for mobile phones has been released.

The test website is now in beta release and can be found at m.wsr.org.uk. This address is merely a subdomain of www.wsr.org.uk and when called it diverts to the single page mobile "site". The page is produced by a Perl script running locally each time the news page is updated. The script also produces the WAP and RSS files.

The page has reduced content as expected for mobile phone usage. For example, content is limited to brief news headlines, thumbnails of the two latest pictures, train times - and we are keen to receive feedback by email along with suggestions for suitable content for mobile phone browsers.

Bookmark m.wsr.org.uk in your mobile phone now...

Special Events

Due to the current communication policy of the Railway's Special Events Planning Team, who choose not to use www.wsr.org.uk to promote the special events, I have reluctantly decided to remove the special events pages. I will also not be able to bring news of expected or cancelled locos or services for these events, due to lack of official confirmation. If the situation changes, and SEPT begin to communicate information to me, I will review the situation. Until then, I can only apologise to folks visiting www.wsr.org.uk expecting details of special events.

Update: Well, I have been convinced my assumptions above are way off the mark and not true. SEPT have not made any such choice so it looks like www.wsr.org.uk is very much a vehicle for SEPT information. I'm now hopeful of better communications in future.

Virtual Trip and Photo Guide

I'm quite pleased with these two pages. The Virtual Trip now has a map of the line with a triangle symbol at each of the featured locations. The use passes the screen pointer over each triangle and the picture and caption changes. The Photographic Locations page works on a similar process. The interaction is minimal but, I think, very effective. The workings are found in the javascripts that manage the dynamic content - just check the page source to see how it works.

A revamp

It needed a revamp. Why?

• Updating was becoming more and more difficult as the website became bigger;
• Most people using broadband - so more pictures
• Most people using screen resolutions greater than 800x600 - so bigger pages
  
• The chance to increase the font size
• The opportunity to improve the navigation of the picture pages and to rationalise the underlying perl scripts and javascripts
• To take advantage of the iframe tag
• To present the information in an less cluttered page design
• Because, in my opinion, the old design was getting a bit tired and in need of a lick of paint

Due to the number of files and scripts, I do not propose to update the whole site and I will concentrate on those pages most often looked at by the website visitors.

Of course, feedback is most welcome.

Twitter thee, please

Is Twitter of use to the West Somerset Railway? I'm not sure. Let's see if a small clickable link on the News page helps folks to "twitter" about some news item they've just seen on the page. They'll need to have a Twitter account of course, but it could be a smart way of further broadcasting WSR stuff.

Creative Commons

Currently, images on www.wsr.org.uk are reduced in size, typically to 512px on the longest side. Picture of the Week images are slightly bigger at 640px maximum. Most published images are accompanied by a copyright statement eg (c) Fred Bloggs

From time to time, images on www.wsr.org.uk have been copied and re-used. Sometimes all parties are happy with this; at other times, it can create some difficulties.

The small size of the images tend to restrict re-use to web pages, blogs, discussion groups and the like. They are not usually suitable for paper publishing or for high quality PDF publishing, although in desperation, it has been known to happen.

The wording on www.wsr.org.uk confirms the copyright remains with the photographer. A condition of supply to www.wsr.org.uk is that the image can be (re)used by the WSR Plc, WSRA and WSSRT in any promotional material produced by those organisations, on sister websites run by those organisations, and to accompany official press releases issued by those organisations. Currently, I do ask that an acknowledgement is provided next to the re-used image, but clearly as re-use gets further away from the source it is difficult to ensure such acknowledgements.

I recognise the re-use issue has some grey areas and I would like to improve the situation. One of the better solutions already in place can be seen on www.geograph.org.uk and it would seem to be suitable for www.wsr.org.uk

I have looked at the Creative Commons licencing http://creativecommons.org/ and I'd welcome your views on whether each image (but not thumbnail images) on www.wsr.org.uk should be subject to such licencing.

I know people can always make illegal use of images regardless what we do, but, with a clear message on the web page with each image, at least some measure of statement would be in place.

Feedback from contributors has been very helpful and I may soon introduce, for new works, at this licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Going faster...and counting hits

Following an offer from Freeola, the guys who provide the webserving for www.wsr.org.uk, I have moved around 1Gb of data to their new go-faster servers. It was one of those "prayer" moments but I'm pleased to say the excellent Freeola service is as good as ever and so far it all looks good.

One of the added extras is a statistics function. This gives me, for the first time, a count if the number of files issued by the server. For example, a call to the Latest Pix page results in 43 files being issued - the page itself plus 42 images. It will be interesting to see how many files (or "hits") are issued in a month.