Good morning. In the last couple of weeks, work has focused both on adding more detail to the maps as is the usual effort, and developing the website. The latter proceeds slowly by steps as it is in effect a completely from the ground up effort which has started from the bare bones of a fully functional LAMPs server with everything except the actual web pages and data files needed to display the maps on screen. Having just been handed a PHP script with no documentation, having to figure out how to deploy it is quite a challenge and the deployment is necessarily being simplified somewhat at this early stage with, for example, static index files that have to have a new line added each time a maps file is created and uploaded, rather than being able to dynamically read the directory and automatically generate an index of it.

After completing the maps for Southdown Station with all the sidings in place, the next determination has been to create sample aerial maps at zoom levels 17-19 as referred to in list posts last week, and testing has suggested these levels, which generate maps taking up 4 MB of disk space, are of a sufficient resolution for useful display without needing to go into zoom level 20 which increases the storage requirement to the point that disk space use is multiplied four times. At this time if a lot of aerial photography is to be uploaded then it is uncertain exactly how much space will be available on the server for this and the rest of the maps so keeping to a lower zoom level is the more conservative option that lets the most aerial photography be added for now.

So having decided on a starting web site design with static hand created html files and duplicates of files like the php script that serves the maps, this standard will be implemented more rapidly going forward, so that more maps will start to be uploaded from here and web pages listing them will start to appear to make the site look like a usual web site with text and hyperlinks to various places.

The aerial map for Southdown in 1972 can be viewed here:

https://blog.nzrailwebmaps.nz/maps/Volume-1-North-Auckland-Line/Stations/Southdown-1972.html