In the past week there have been two main areas of work in this project. The first area is the Christchurch City maps referred to in a previous diary entry. It has been decided to combine existing maps of the city created for non-rail purposes with the existing rail maps data drawn for the city, which means there will be a combined Volume 10 and Volume 11 Qgis project that covers only Christchurch. To make things easier this project will share the existing Volume 10 and 11 layers with the rest of those volumes existing projects and will not have separate layers except for the aerial photos that are not of rail corridors or yards. At the same time the existing Volume 10 and Volume 11 projects will have all aerial photography removed that is inside the boundaries of the city.
The other area is the NZ Rail Maps website on Wordpress.com. This currently is accessed by the address http://nzrailmaps.wordpress.com . It will generally be known that the project also uses the domain name nzrailmaps.nz which currently redirects to a Trainweb site for historical reasons. Given the length of time that the Trainweb site has not been used for the project, it is likely the redirection will be changed soon to point directly to the Wordpress site. However there is no intention for the present to change the site URL to nzrailmaps.nz as this requires a paid Wordpress hosting plan. The other change has been driven by the decision that the Wordpress site has enough free space to host the map volume PDF files, which means they can be removed off Scribd thus reducing the number of external sites used to host project content. However the free version of Wordpress is not conducive to hosting the map tiles which are best to remain as Google Photos albums for the time being. Generally we are well behind in publishing completed project content and this needs to be put together and put on the site as more of a priority in future.
It is hoped that the computer used to do the map mosaic tiles will get a bigger SSD soon to enable it to deal with very large project files more easily, or to be able to have two 100-layer projects open at the same time.
