Well people, massive apologies for the lack of posts on this blog all this year. Although the blog hasn’t been updated all this time, the project has had plenty of updates which have been ongoing throughout the year. The main thing that has been happening in September is changes to NZ Rail Maps websites. The web maps site is being shut down and replaced by a Google Earth Web project that displays the same information with many additional useful features and benefits courtesy of Google. This will not replace the other published formats of the project but fulfills the desired functionality of having a navigation client for the project, which could otherwise only be achieved on the webmaps site with further design changes. Simply put, the Google Earth Web client has major functionality improvements whilst removing the need to maintain and update a web server and is by far the best way of supporting a web based version of maps into the future, including after NZRM has shut down.

As there are still some possible uses of the webmaps formats out there, the Project will continue to support the MBTiles files that contain the XYZ tiles for the webmaps site and these will be made available for download in a specific Downloads section of the site. This site will also include the KML files that are used in the Google Earth Web client.

The Volumes site is also being integrated with the blog site at the moment. The posts have been imported into this site and will start to appear over the coming week. These measures all taken together will streamline the user experience for people who access the NZRM project website and make it simpler to continue maintaining the site and its content.