Wednesday 31 October 2018

Website: Major change to Google Plus

Google announced three weeks ago they would be closing Google Plus down.

The NZ Rail Maps project does use Google Plus to collate links to some of our content. We don't actually host content on Google Plus itself but we do use other Google services and these aren't affected.

Because of this change in Google Plus I have to decide what is the best way to collate this content. I do have a number of options but I do naturally want to keep with a free web hosting option in the short term. However this may be a time to consider low cost web hosting but because the domain name redirects to a free web server that is very reliable and long term committed, I do also have the option of keeping that as is and either leveraging off that to another free web host or building a full site around that.

Many years ago I did create my own web site builder software for Windows to build a number of Trainweb sites. Being on Linux I don't expect to pick that up or run the site builder on Windows again. So there are a number of possible options to consider.

Google Plus will not be offline until next August so there is plenty of time to look at options.

The web home page has been changed to point to Google Plus collections. This is an interim measure until I reach a decision about how best to collate content outside of Google Plus. Those collections themselves are not being updated as I would prefer to work on a replacement instead.