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Site Updates

Update to the Gazetteer

The main feature of this site, that is a work in progress (due to the scale of what is required) is the Gazetteer. Currently, this is railway stations only but the long term plan is to cover all IH features.

One thing that has been holding me back is how to efficiently get information out of the master database I have developed over three decades of my interest in IH (stored in Microsoft Access). In the last week, I cracked this problem in relation to the creation of photo pages for the photos I have taken and placed online.

The other area I have been aware that my site was lacking in was presentation. The html pages are basic (largely hand coded html) without CSS and associated stylesheets.

I have now updated all stations (barring 2 minor stations) on the Dublin to Sligo line with a new format (using CSS) that I intend to roll out to all locations. The new photo gallery pages for each location are now a link to a separate page (see here for Mullingar as an example) for each photo, with a narrative explaining the image.

During the update of the pages for the Sligo line, I encountered a few errors in the data in my underlying database and these have also been corrected. This is a secondary benefit of this process.

It is my intention to continue the rollout of this new format across the site.