Good evening. Today is a big day in the NZ Rail Maps project. We’re launching our website, we’re publishing Volume 6 of NZ Rail Maps for the Wairarapa Line, and we’re starting to write our blog posts directly on this WordPress site.

After looking at some ideas of how we could host a website, we have decided to host most of the content on a SmugMug site which will cost $132 per year and is really a great platform for any type of graphic content, although it is mainly aimed at photography. SmugMug is the company that purchased Flickr from Yahoo several years ago, and we previously hosted our graphic content (the maps themselves) on Flickr until the free tier was cut back following its sale. We also pay $28 per year currently for our domain registration which is separately managed by a local domain registrar here in NZ.

The content that will not be hosted on SmugMug is this blog, the old blog, and the content on the old Trainweb site. All these sites will continue to exist as they do now, but will be gradually updated to reflect the change to the new SmugMug site for most of the electronically produced and accessible content. So this WordPress site is a bit of a mess at the moment until we get all the content currently linked from it, hosted on the main site. Since the new site is very much a work in progress, it will take a while to learn how to use it and fully transfer everything to it.

The publication of Volume 6 will be separately announced on this blog shortly.