the wsr.org.uk blog

Then and Now

2011-05-03T07:07:00.003Z

Then and Now is a new feature on the website which matches, as near as possible, the location of older pictures with recent pictures. The photographers of the recent pictures have tried really hard to simulate the same view by standing in the same position if possible and using a camera lens to capture the same field of view, and so on. It's almost impossible to get an exact match for a variety of reasons but the final result can still be close enough for viewers to get a good idea of the changes over the years. There are a small number of "Then and Now" pictures now online and I hope to process more examples as and when suitable material becomes available.

Videos and Maps

2010-10-11T08:32:00.003Z

Spurred on by the great webpage http://www.google.ru/intl/ru/landing/transsib/en.html showing a video taken aboard the Moscow-Vladivostok train on the Trans-Siberian Railway synchronised with a Google Map which shows the progress of the train, I looked at the code behind this superb webpage. I quickly realised that hacking the code to produce a WSR version would take a long time indeed, so put this idea on hold. Then I stumbled across the quite amazing VidMap website http://www.vidmap.de/ which enables users to build their own video-map application using YouTube videos and Google Maps which can be embedded into websites, blogs and so on. Thanks to VidMap, and to a YouTube uploader, and Google, there are now two WSR "vidmaps" online showing cab views of journeys from Minehead to Blue Anchor at http://www.wsr.org.uk/vidmap01.htm and from Blue Anchor to Watchet at http://www.wsr.org.uk/vidmap02.htm

Maps and the Picture of the Week

2010-05-26T20:28:00.003Z

I've managed to add two small maps to recent Picture of the Week pages to show the location of the main subject of the photograph. One map using OSOpenSpace mapping and the other shows an aerial image using Google Maps. I do hope to explore the chances of extending the idea to the Latest Pictures pages but as there are often several images per day this will involve a lot more data inputting which might affect the website update turnaround times. Bit of a trade off I guess.

OS OpenSpace

2010-03-16T09:25:00.004Z

Making good use of the OpenSpace mapping from Ordnance Survey which brings a range of OS mapping to websites. No OS imagery (yet) but the mapping is much better than the stuff served up by Google Maps. All station pages now have new OS maps to help visitor find the location. Still work in progress but several new maps being prepared including a guide to lineside photography locations.

No electronic live information at Spring Gala

2010-03-16T09:22:00.001Z

The web-based Gala information system will not operate during the Spring Steam Gala. Although the system was successfully trialled at the Winter Steam Festival, it has not been possible to gain permission to run a similar process during the forthcoming Spring Steam Gala. Arrival and departure times, along with comments, are added by the Controller to a web-based database, which in turn presents basic current information to a webpage viewable by the public or staff on a standard browser or web-enabled mobile phone. Additionally the Controller is able to selectively send emails and text messages of current information to staff or subcribers. It is hoped to run the system at a future special event.

Live arrivals and departures

2010-01-05T13:53:00.003Z

At the recent Winter Steam Festival, an internet-based version of the standard "special event" control log was trialled. The controller entered arrival and departure times and delay information, along with any other comment about the day's events, into a browser-based form, rather than the Word documents previously used. As such, the trial was a success, and the feedback now being received will help hone the system if and when it is adopted for full use at special events. Trains ran to time at the WSF and there were no major incidents, so it is difficult to determine the full worth of such a system. The next event is the six-day Spring Steam Gala with plenty of scope for things to go (slightly) wrong.

However, being internet and database-based, the system is capable of considerable additional uses. During the WSF trial, emails and text messages were sent out to a few volunteer receipients, some staff, some linesiders, when a train left one of the signalled places along the line. Over 500 texts were sent. The information was also made available on a read-only webpage and on a cut-down webpage suitable for mobile phones. The idea behind the additional dissemination is to provide current train running information to station staff, travellers and linesiders. Feedback as been very favourable.

The system was the idea of one of the WSR's signalmen, and developed by www.wsr.org.uk It runs on www.wsr.org.uk but if adopted for futher use, it will be transferred to the WSR Plc website in due course.

Going mobile

2009-11-03T18:03:00.002Z

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

2009-06-16T07:47:00.004Z

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

2009-04-14T15:38:00.004Z

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

2009-02-28T20:51:00.004Z

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

2009-02-08T15:17:00.001Z

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

2009-01-16T19:15:00.002Z

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

2009-01-16T19:07:00.002Z

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.

Fav Icon

2008-07-25T20:16:00.003Z

Just updated the little icon that appears next to the website URL in the address bar and also in the Favourites (if http://www.wsr.org.uk/ has been added). It's not much to report but it was fun doing it.

Panoramic views

2008-07-14T20:51:00.003Z

Thanks entirely to the work of Rodney Greenway who has been out and about with camera, I have added some panoramic views of the station pages for Watchet, Doniford, Williton, Stogumber, Crowcombe Heathfield and Bishops Lydeard. Thanks also due to Martin Krolik at http://www.krolik.net/index.jsp for the hard work in scripting the code behind the viewer. I hope these 360 degree views help website visitors to see more of the stations and perhaps turn the virtual visit into a real one :-)

No more click-thru ads

2008-05-20T20:16:00.003Z

A recent problem for some visitors to the website was the unexpected appearance of pop-up advertising undesirable subjects.

Taking the advice of the website hosts, Freeola, I removed all Javascript code that loaded content from third parties directly into the www.wsr.org.uk pages, and that included the Google Ads code.

Now I don't think it the content of my website that was causing the problems. Opening a www.wsr.org.uk page might have simply triggered a "nastie" already lurking on the visitor's machine from process not connected with www.wsr.org.uk , which then forced the pop-ups to appear.

A good clean-up and updating of security software would seem to be the medicine to advise visitors who are asking what to do.

But then, what do I know? It's all a bit beyond me. But Google Ads will not be re-appearing for a while, so Google can keep the $15 they owe me :-)

A chain of webcams, perhaps?

2008-03-29T15:46:00.003Z

Recently, the webcam pages carried a request for website visitors to send in their thoughts on the webcams. Scores replied. The results suggest the webcams serve a very useful purpose in creating interest in the West Somerset Railway. Some people went further and said they would now visit the Railway to experience it for real. There were many requests for more webcams - mostly at Minehead.

The problem with installing more on railway premises is the non-availability of good, secure locations which have nearby access to a broadband-connected PC.

So what's the title of this posting all about? Well, there are several accommodation premises along the Railway which enjoy a view of passing trains, and if the owners could be persuaded to install and run a webcam and feed the images via http://www.wsr.org.uk/ along with details and pictures of their establishment, they might benefit from bookings from website visitors. What I need to do now is to find someone who can "sell" the idea to these folks...

Google Maps

2008-02-23T22:12:00.004Z

Just had some fun with Google Maps and especially playing with the various existing KML files which can be simply brought in. The route of the railway - captured using a reliable map base - doesn't always fit the Google satellite background and the Google Maps cartographic layer is pretty aweful when zoomed in. However, it's fun software to play with, for me and other users so it'll stay for the foreseeable future. The URL is http://www.wsr.org.uk/gmap.htm

Another fun thing is to visit http://maps.google.co.uk and enter http://www.wsr.org.uk/kml/wsr2.kml into the Google Maps Search Box. Other kml files to try include http://www.wsr.org.uk/kml/pix.kml for a vast number of photographic locations along the line.

I'm sure more can be done with this technology.

Click through ads...

2008-01-06T17:23:00.000Z

Well it had to happen. The costs of running the website are beginning to hurt the pocket so a very minor relent to the "no ads" policy has seen the introduction of a "click thru" ad service by a well known internet company. The ads are limited to the "Where to stay" page which seems the most appropriate page, having content that the ads can easily complement, perhaps even be useful to the visitor, who in many cases, might be looking for external information. I will monitor the sucess or otherwise whilst considering which other pages might be suitable.

Favourites

2007-12-23T20:45:00.000Z

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

2007-11-19T07:05:00.000Z

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

2007-10-03T13:07:00.001Z

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

2007-09-23T13:15:00.000Z

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

2007-07-29T12:30:00.000Z

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

2007-06-15T20:48:00.000Z

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

2007-05-12T14:33:00.000Z

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

2007-05-05T18:32:00.000Z

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

2007-04-26T20:15:00.000Z

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

2007-04-16T16:23:00.000Z

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

2007-03-31T15:22:00.000Z

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...

2007-03-27T20:32:00.000Z

... 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

2007-03-05T07:16:00.000Z

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...

2007-02-25T15:21:00.000Z

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

2007-02-15T07:19:00.000Z

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

2007-02-10T19:08:00.000Z

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...

2007-01-20T15:02:00.000Z

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

2007-01-13T11:40:00.000Z

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...

2007-01-11T19:34:00.000Z

...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

2007-01-08T17:11:00.000Z

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

2007-01-07T13:03:00.000Z

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...

2007-01-06T15:45:00.000Z

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"

2007-01-05T21:43:00.000Z

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

2007-01-04T17:30:00.000Z

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

2007-01-04T13:10:00.000Z

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.