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| I've created a new "track" in the Abandoned Rails Yard: Website Statistics. It's real simple, really: it just shows counts of each of the concepts on the site, such as Articles, Railroad companies, and pictures. When posted, the counts were 336, 425, and 1597, respectively. Let's see how much these numbers change in a 6-month period or so. |
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| Posted by Greg Harrison at | | | |
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I just completed a new "New Stuff" page (aka "The Yard"), and updated the website with it yesterday. Previously, The Yard included only new articles that were posted in the past two weeks (14 days). Then the Holidays happened, and I went 14 days without adding any new articles to the site, meaning that The Yard was, well, empty. So last week, I changed it to show all the new articles that have been posted in the past 30 days, just to make it look like that I've been posting new stuff. Now that we are past the Holidays, I have been able to start posting new articles again, meaning that we have more stuff in The Yard now. But yesterday, I had a revelation. In the past week or so, I have been adding many new pictures (scanned from original slides) of Railroad Companies from the 60s and 70s to the website. However, the website didn't keep track of nor indicate new pictures, so visitors would never have known that new pictures have been added unless they are frequent visitors to the pages of those particular Railroad Companies. I then decided that perhaps The Yard should not only show new articles that have been posted, but also new Railroad Pictures that have been added in the past 30 days. Not only that, but it could also indicate when new pictures have been added to pre-existing articles. But why stop there? I could also change The Yard to also show new external links that have been added... So now The Yard shows 1.) new articles, 2.) new railroad pictures, 3.) new article pictures, and 4.) new external links, that have been posted in the past 30 days. If you visit the site often, I would say that The Yard should be your first stop when visiting -- maybe even be the bookmarked page in your Favorites. |
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| Posted by Greg Harrison at | | | |
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Well, here we are, 30 days out from the debut of Abandoned Rails 3.0, so let's see where we are. I must say that I have been rather busy with pretty much all aspects of the site. First, I have had many contributors submit new articles and pictures since the debut, so I've been busy adding those to the site. Some of the submitted stuff requires a new format for storing the data (particularly the upcoming timetables), so I've been working on creating the database structure and pages for adding/displaying the new content. Fortunately, the databse design allows easy addition of new content layouts, because I designed it that way. :) All told, I probably spend a couple of hours a day (5 days a week) on the site now, which is about three times as much as I did before the new website release. But I enjoy every minute of it, and look forward to where this site will go in the future. Just for posterity, here are some counts from the database: Articles: 313 Pictures: 1,392 Railroads: 412 Needless to say, the amount of content is already pretty large, and is growing day by day. |
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| Posted by Greg Harrison at | | | |
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The next version of the abandonedrails.com website is here! [applause] Why the change? As mentioned in my last blog entry, I did acquire a large source of abandoned railroad content -- the abandonedrailroads.com website. That means that I have imported almost 200 articles, and over 600 pictures. The current database layout for all this new content was ill-prepared. Plus with all these articles and pictures now, there had to be a better way to get to it. So, I took inspiration from the abandonedrailroads.com website, and included a U.S. Map to use for searching content. But why stop there? I also decided to allow searching by railroad company. All these changes, plus a new database layout, pretty much dictated that a new site flow was needed. Gone are the picture groups and such. Everything is now cross-referenced with each other. The colors and interface is familiar, but the new content is easy to access and read. I will write more about this later, I'm sure. But I did need to put a final note of thanks in here. To Jimmy Summers: Thank you very much for the opportunity to take over the content of your great site. I am very appreciative! |
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| Posted by Greg Harrison at | | | |
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It seems that not a lot has happened with the site in a while, and the absence of recent blog entries confirms that. While I have been uploading some pictures, I haven't done a lot with the site in the past few months. Which I guess is understandable, since it is summer, and there are plenty of other things occupying my time.
Rest assured that, in the back of my mind, I still have a small list of enhancements to the site that I will begin working on, probably closer to the time autumn rolls around. For example, I may revamp the picture group page. This is the page that displays all the pictures in a group. Presently, all the pictures display within a box which also contains the group description. I think it may be time to get "outside the box", so look for pictures with their individual descriptions, and NO BOX.
Another "project" that I have been contemplating is incorporating Google Maps. While I already have an example of their use on the Greenville Tour page (which still hasn't been "released"), they may serve the site better if put in other lines of duty. I won't delve into it now, but that is something else to look for.
What else? Well, just between you and me, it looks like I may be acquiring a rather large source of abandoned railroad content to put up on the site. I am still working on this one, though, and it may not even come to pass. Be sure to check back in the next couple of weeks to see what the status is. If it does work out, it will be quite exciting!
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| Posted by Greg Harrison at | | | |
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Back when I first started abandonedrails.com (and as I have mentioned on here before), I didn't have a lot of photographs to post, save for the ones taken with my Nikon point-and-shoot film camera. So in order to get some immediate online content to the site, I scanned in the small collection of prints I had and hastily uploaded them to the website. These pictures are still there today -- some of them can even by noted by the presense of the "date" in the lower right-hand corner.
With over 500 digital pictures now occupying the site, the scanned pictures are mightily outnumbered. And compared to the digital pictures, the scanned pictures weren't as eye-catching with muted colors and hazy outlines. Ironically, the most-viewed picture on the site, the Galveston Switcher, is a scanned picture.
I decided that since that particular picture was the most popular on the site, I should re-scan it from the original print, and perhaps touch it up a bit. So I went back through my albums and found it, along with another picture of it that I had forgotten about.
I scanned them both in, cropped them, and applied a little unsharp mask to them to clear them up. I also fiddled with the colors (contrast and saturation) in order to bring out the natural coloring of the scene. The result is more pleasing then before, and both enhanced pictures are now on the site. Since none of the other scanned images were "enhanced", I figured now would be a good time to do them (there are only about 20 or so).
So if you look closely enough, you might be able to tell that the scanned images are cleaner and more colorful.
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| Posted by Greg Harrison at | | | |
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Ideally, I would like for my site to host old pictures of railroads, much like the fallen-flags website (although in a more convenient fashion). While I admit that I am a bit saddened that I was not around to see some of the great railroad companies when they existed and capture their magic, I realized that I can take pictures of railroads today, and perhaps in 10 or so years, these pictures would be considered "old" and they would be on my website. It's kind of a long-range goal, but a goal nonetheless.
Besides the scans of my old 35mm pictures, all the pictures taken by me on abandonedrails.com were taken with my Canon PowerShot A80. It's a good camera, especially for an amatuer photographer like myself, and comes with just enough manual features to have some fun.
One thing the camera lacks is a strong zoom. 12x zoom is claimed by Canon, but only if you use the digital zoom. I'm more of a purist I guess, so I never use the digital zoom, thus relying on the optical zoom, whose limit is 3x. Sometimes, a railroad track is not close to public lands, and at those distances, a 3x zoom just doesn't cut it.
To remedy, I have purchased a "digital accessory" kit for my camera, which comes with a telephoto lens, a wide-angle lens, a couple of lens filters, a mini tripod (3" tall), a regular tripod, and a nice carrying case. I'm pretty excited about it and am looking forward to the UPS box arriving on my doorstep. Hopefully with this kit, I can start taking better (and more) pictures to present on my website.
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| Posted by Greg Harrison at | | | |
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There hasn't been a whole lot of new features added to the site for about a month now, which isn't to say that I haven't been adding new pictures, either.
I have started working on the tour of Greenville, Texas. This will be a departure from the format of previous tours, as it will be map-based.
Eh? "Map-based"? What does that mean?
I discovered a couple of weeks ago that Google Maps provides an API to harness their technology and use it for your own purposes. It didn't take me long to figure out that I could start creating maps for abandonedrails.com and using them to indicate where a particular picture was taken. I then figured out that these maps would inherently lend themselves to my tours, so looks like Greenville is the guinnea pig.
If you would like to see a "sneak peak" at what I'm working on, visit the Greenville Tour page. Please be warned that this is a work in progress right now, and the page may not always work as it is in development stages, and I may be working on it at the same time you're viewing it.
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| Posted by Greg Harrison at | | | |
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While adding pictures to a new group, "Dallas Market Center Spur", I realized that one of the pictures added may be the 500th picture on the website. Once I finished, I looked in the database to see if the 500th record was reached and sure enough, 506 records existed.
So, I present to you picture number 500 on abandonedrails.com:
http://image.abandonedrails.com/?id=521
Not a particularly memorable photo, but a red-letter photo nonetheless.
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| Posted by Greg Harrison at | | | |
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I added a small new feature to the homepage: the "Newest" link.
This link takes you to a page showing 10 pictures that are the newest on the site. Using this, frequent visitors see the latest additions to the site without having to filter through pictures they've already seen.
It makes a nice addition to the pre-existing "Random" and "Popular" links.
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| Posted by Greg Harrison at | | | |
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