.com - London Transport Service Vehicles on the webAn all-new version of this website is now available at www.ltsv.com/sv/. These pages are no longer being updated.
| .com - London Transport Service Vehicles on the web | |||||||
An all-new version of this website is now available at www.ltsv.com/sv/. These pages are no longer being updated. | |||||||
| Forum: | Web Site |
| Topic: | Diary of a Webmaster |
| Post | Created |
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| One year on. | Sat 30/09/06, 20:27 |
1 Reply |
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| The LTSVplus website is one year old this weekend so this seems a suitable time to review progress so far. Looking back at the pre-2005 version of this website (which still languishes at www.ltsv.com), it seems that the switch to a database-driven site was very much the right thing to do. The amount of information contained, and the felxibility with which it can be viewed, makes the old site pretty poor by comparison. Due to a generous development and testing period, and the feedback of several contributors, the initial design seems to be coping well with continued use, and most of the changes since have been incremental rather than fundamental. Apart from the addition of ever more fleetdata and photographs, enhancements have included the addition of graphic icons for many of the more common vehicle types, and improved visibility of visitors own sightings. The only real problem occured in July when my host suffered a server failure and a couple of months worth of additions and contributions were lost. Most of these were able to be re-entered and my own back-up procedures have since been improved. Looking at the size of the web site, the stats are there for all to see (1500+ pictures, 7000+ vehicles). What may be interesting to some is that the pages themselves only take up 356KB of disk space. This is because they only contain programming code that gathers information from the database or displays pictures. The 1550 pictures so far posted take up 140MB. With my current web hosting package (costing £25 per year) it looks like I have space for a further 2000 pictures before an upgrade is needed (despite the recent increase in image size)! The database, which contains all the forum posts, news stories, sightings and member details as well as the main vehicle data, accounts for just 3MB. Given the subject matter, this site was never intended for a huge audience and I therefore don't delve into the statistics much. However, looking at the last month, my host reports that the number of unique visitors per day varies from a low of 41 to just over 100. The number of pages served per day ranges from 428 to 2116. Looking at the actual site, it is clear that the number of people actually contributing information and comments on a regular basis is very low, perhaps 4 or 5 out of the 50 registered visitors supplying the bulk of the content. Following the addition of fleet data in two new categories recently (hires and other Companies), the next development is likely to be the adddition of a pocket-sized fleetlist for use when out and about. It seems likely that I will not bother trying to detail the history of the locations listed on the web site as many (particularly bus garages) are covered elsewhere. There may however be some articles on where to see SVs, and how to identify them! The only other long-outstanding task is to add more of the allocation histories for the older vehicles. It would be useful to know how much interest there would be in this. One final development to mention is the possibility of making the web site available on CD-ROM. I have found some software that can perform the web server function required to view PHP files, and this means that I could make CD-ROMs with the entire site on them. This would be fully functional except that adding new data will not be possible. It will also obviously be a snap-shot of the site at a given date, but it may be useful to allow users to browse at leisure rather than using on-line time. I will post more details soon but let me know if you might be interested in this. |
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| So many sightings! | Thu 02/11/06, 01:23 |
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| It is probably just as well that there are not a huge number of contributors. We have already chalked up over 8000 sightings, 4300 this year alone! Thanks everyone. | |||