Railpage Australia
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| URL | http://www.railpage.com.au/ |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | No |
| Type of site | Railway enthusiast website |
| Registration | Free |
| Owner | Railpage Networks |
| Created by | Railpage Networks |
Railpage Australia is a website focusing on railways within Australia and Oceania. It is one of the oldest websites in Australia and easily the largest railway-oriented website in Australia.
The site is run by volunteers and operates on hardware that is inadequate to handle the volume of Internet traffic it generates.
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General
Railpage is the largest railway-oriented web-sites in Australia[citation needed] and was among the first 100 web sites to be hosted in Australia[1].
The site allows railway enthusiasts to find and exchange news, pictures and information relating to mainly Australian trains and railway infrastructure. The site includes a user photo database, discussion forums, a chat room and a railway news section.
The discussion forums are divided into separate sections, such as Australian based discussions, heritage interest groups, and overseas discussions.
In December 2003, Railpage assisted the then Australian Geological Survey Organisation (now Geoscience Australia) and the Australasian Railway Association in the production of the Railways of Australia thematic map.
Although around 50 percent[2] of forum users are under 26 years of age, nearly a quarter of contributors are involved in the rail industry[3]. Those who have contributed in an official capacity have included the president of the Public Transport Users Association Daniel Bowen[4], the Victorian Director of Public Transport Jim Betts[5] and the Victorian Department of Infrastructure's Fare Policy Manager Adrian Webb.[4] Television presenter Scott McGregor has participated in a live chat on the web site.[6]
History
Railpage started in 1992 as a cfingerd service on David Bromage's account on Monash University's general access Unix server. Anybody could finger the account and view the indexpage, and further view the railpage. The name lives on.
The content of the finger service was translated to an experimental web site in July 1994. It is believed to have been the first Australian railway site on the World Wide Web. Early content included a repository of Australian railway timetables, inspired by a contemporary project in the United States.
In January 1995, Brian Evans suggested to David Bromage that Railpage (which at that point comprised static web pages) could be further developed. The two began to develop the site further, later transferring it to a dedicated server.
The site gained its own domain name (railpage.org.au) in January 1997.
On January 11, 2003, Railpage introduced an on-line forums service using the open source PhpBB forum software. As of June 2006, it is awaiting inclusion on the Big-boards.com index.
Assuming the role of Project Director, (which he still maintains today), Brian Evans proposed the website enter a new development phase, involving the introduction of a Content Management System (CMS). The site had accumulated a significant number of unique URLs and was becoming increasingly harder to maintain. A solution to provide content owners with an ability to create and maintain content at the site became a priority.
Late in 2003, after several months of development and with the help of several developers and testers; RP2 was launched on Saturday 10 April 2004 at approximately 5pm. While at the time the portal structure was primitive and contained a number of bugs present in all Nuke releases - the portal offered a number of new services to users including an image gallery and news feeds.
As of May 2006, the site routinely receives in excess of 1000 posts per day, 10,000 unique visitors, 100,000 hits, and serves well in excess of 300 gigabytes of data per month[citation needed]. As of August 2006, the site had reached 10,000 registered users and 550,000 posts.
Technical
Railpage has and continues to endure a significant amount of technical difficulties. The hardware Railpage runs on is old, and while it was capable of handling the load experienced in 2003; present load is far too much for the hardware resulting in numerous outages, some of which require human intervention. Different parts of the site run on three separate servers, with the result that some parts may be off-line while others parts are working.
Railpage Australia is based on PHP-Nuke, however as times wears on it bears less and less resemblance to the original release. Its code base is PHP and the back end database runs MySQL. A re-theming reduced the amount of code of generated pages.
References
- ^ In June 1994, one month before Railpage was translated to a web site, there were 2,738 web sites in the entire world.[1] At the time Australia had between 2 and 3% of total world Internet presence.[2][3]
- ^ Your age as at 1 June 2006, a poll taken of forum users (140 responses), retrieved 9 March 2007.
- ^ What is your occupation?, a poll taken of forum users (121 responses), retrieved 10 March 2007.
- ^ http://www.railpage.com.au/f-p577500#577500
