The above is the home page you will see when you put the address

http://live.blog.nzrailwebmaps.nz

into your web browser. It is starting as a default WordPress site and as Project spends time customising it, will change in appearance to resemble this blog.

As of today, Project has signed with GoDaddy NZ for 1 year for a special discount price of $20.56. This gives a Linux hosted site with plenty of space for hosting both this blog and web tile maps. The site will thus have two parts:

• Documentation, using the included WordPress blog. This includes all existing blog posts on nzrailmaps.wordpress.com that will be migrated to the new site.
• Web tile maps: a website to provide online viewing of NZ Rail Maps content. This is a new development of NZ Rail Maps Project that has been discussed in recent posts.

The site URL shown above is a temporary URL used for development purposes to allow the existing website at www.blog.nzrailwebmaps.nz (hosted on SmugMug) to continue operating as it is at present alongside this website. Project will allow SmugMug site to stay up as long as necessary (not more than 3 months) enabling the new site to be developed alongside it. However, further development of the existing site will essentially be frozen from this point going forward.

The new site will become the default web site for www.blog.nzrailwebmaps.nz as soon as it is developed enough to replace the existing SmugMug site. Project does not know when this will take place since it is necessary to replace all of the existing content on SmugMug. It is possible as an interim step the existing maps map be migrated back to Google photo albums whilst the web tile maps are developed so that SmugMug site can be shut down soon.

Project has a test version of web tile maps for Northland ready to go onto the demo site within the next few weeks for further testing. In fact this could be up within days. This is where Volume 1 content will appear going forward. The site will go through various stages of development as there is a lot of work to get something that looks like the type of content currently hosted with SmugMug, especially with aerial photos. It is likely the site will incorporate historical mosaic photos as part of the included web tile maps, but the best way of serving current aerial photos is probably by bringing them in live from the Linz Basemaps site rather than by including them in the web tiles hosted on the nzrailmaps site.

Stay tuned for further updates on development of the new web site for NZ Rail Maps Project. This will be staged as a lot of work is needed and probably the focus over the rest of this year is going to prioritise migrating some form of the existing content from SmugMug to enable it to be shut down soon. Some of the SmugMug functionality may be lost in the short term and reinstated later. Project does not undertake to give a particular timeframe for development. There are many steps of development that will take a lot of time to implement alongside the task of progressing with Volume 1 itself. There is still a goal of completing Volume 1 which has been shifted to the end of 2020 to allow the web site to be developed to host it when it is ready for production. The alternate to that is that Volume 1 might actually be ready a lot sooner but only be hosted in a more basic form.

Printable content is going to be the only truly offline form of content for the site since it will not be straightforward to download static images for the site in the way that can now be done with the photo album format on www.blog.nzrailwebmaps.nz . Project will make a decision soon about format of these whether Kindle, printed or both.