| May 11, 2008 |
| New Images of Sprinter In North County San Diego. These include lots of photos of the trains in action. Photos at Coast Highway and CSU San Marco. Go... |
|
| May 7, 2008 |
| New Metro Green line images and movies on the .mac site |
|
| Jan 9, 2008 |
| New Mexico Rail Runner is a commuter train in the Albuquerque, NM area. The trains feature a distinctive Road Runner motif. Go... |
|
| Jan 6, 2008 |
| New photos of Old Pueblo Trolley in Tucson, AZ. Some of the photos feature old fashioned ads. Go...
|
|
| Dec 1, 2007 |
| Los Angeles Gold Line photos have been added to the .mac site. Many of these are interior shots. You really get a sense of how large the picture windows are. There are also lots of shots near the Pasadena Santa Fe station. Go... |
|
| Jul 30, 2007 |
| Sprinter is a DMU light rail line from Oceanside to Escondido in northern San Diego County. Service is scheduled to start in December 2007. Photos of cars and stations have been added |
Go...
|
| Jun 16, 2007 |
| Alameda / Oakland Ferry now added |
Go...
|
| Jun 15, 2007 |
| CalTrain commuter train from San Francisco to San Jose now has a decent set of photos. |
Go...
|
| Jun 14, 2007 |
| Sacramento LRT extension Sacramento Valley Station has been added. Many of the new light rail cars are shown too. |
Go...
|
| Jun 13, 2007 |
| The Western Railway Museum has preserved may streetcars from the Bay Area and the Central Valley. |
Go...
|
| Jun 12, 2007 |
| The Sacramento River has a huge delta with hundreds of islands. Bridges connect most of the islands, but a few ferries remain. |
Go...
|
| Jun 11, 2007 |
| Ontario Airport shuttle have been added. It was late in the evening when I took them. The quality it not the best, but the buses are of a model I have not seen before |
Go...
|
| Jun 10, 2007 |
| MUNI T Third photos have been added. |
Go...
|
| Jun 9, 2007 |
| I have a huge backload of photos. I hope to get some of them up. I started with San Pedro Red Car |
Go...
|
| Mar 10, 2007 |
| New photos of Winchester LRT line in San Jose has been added. These photos include new low floor cars |
Go...
|
| Feb 25, 2007 |
| It has been a while since I uploaded anything. Here are some Long Beach Transit ferries for your viewing pleasure |
Go...
|
| May 14, 2006 |
| All the Sacramento images have now been updated. Lots of new images from there |
Go...
|
| Apr 30, 2006 |
| 3000th image has been added to Transit Rider |
Go...
|
| Apr 9, 2006 |
| Sacramento Folsom area stuff is now uploaded |
Go...
|
| Apr 3, 2006 |
| I finally made it to San Francisco. The movie for San Francisco are up. I included the approximate run time and file size. I have about 150 still photos I hope to get up within the next few weeks. I think San Jose will be my next destination |
Go...
|
| Mar 27, 2006 |
| I may have wanted to go to San Francisco, but I ended up in Sacramento! I had a great time there an have lots of new stuff to show for it. The first stuff to go up will be various movie clips of light rail action. |
Go...
|
| Mar 17, 2006 |
| I really, really want to head to San Francisco 24-26. F-Market and N-Judah currently interest me most. |
|
| Mar 12, 2006 |
| Lots of new stuff for Long Beach Transit including shuttles and water taxis |
Go...
|
| Feb 5, 2006 |
| Two new movies for the Los Angeles Metro Blue Line are now available for download |
Go...
|
| Jan 16, 2006 |
| On a very unrelated yet personal note. There is a guy out there who claims to be the "west coast transitphotography KING" [sic]. He has some impressive stuff here and there, but ... |
|
| Jan 15, 2006 |
| I have some big plans for the year. I hope to visit Las Vegas, Portland, and Salt Lake City. I already have some photos of the unloved El Monte Busway. |
Go...
|
| Dec 11, 2005 |
| Gold Line in Pasadena has new photos |
Go...
|
| Nov 24, 2005 |
| A bunch more Metro Orange Line photos are up |
Go...
|
| Nov 8, 2005 |
| Some more images have been loaded. The Metro Rapid page is looking good. |
Go...
|
| Oct 26, 2005 |
| Speaking of the Harbor Transitway, new photos of all the stations have been added. |
Go...
|
| Oct 25, 2005 |
| The Los Angeles Metro Orange Line [bus] is opening soon. If you ignore the El Monte Busway, the Harbor Transitway, Metro Rapid, the freeway bus stops on the Hollywood Freeway, Spring St. contraflow lane, the Long Beach Transit Mall, then you could say this is a new thing with buses. It's the bus that acts like a bus. |
Go...
|
| Oct 10, 2005 |
| I recently purchased an Olympus E-300 Evolt. The first set of photos taken with have been posted. Check out the Balboa Island Ferry |
Go...
|
| Sep 29, 2005 |
| 2000th image has been added to the site! |
|
| Jul 31, 2005 |
| Every once in a while a well trained eye will find something unexpected. One of my other interests is water fountains and I heard that The Grove shopping center had one. To my surprise, I also found railroad tracks. On the tracks is a single car that shuttles between the shopping center and the Farmers Market. |
Go...
|
| Jul 17, 2005 |
| San Diego Trolley now operates through a short subway under SDSU. They also now have new low floor S70 LRVs |
Go...
|
| Jul 10, 2005 |
| Los Angeles Metro Gold line has been added |
Go...
|
| Jun 26, 2005 |
| Las Vegas Monorail has been added |
Go...
|
| Jun 23, 2005 |
| The search tool has been fixed. AND all the links have been scrubbed. You should be able to find everything on the site very quickly now |
|
| Jun 18, 2005 |
| All of the external links on this site have been scrubbed. Every target in the Orange boxes should now take you to a real site |
|
| Jun 6, 2005 |
| I visited Metrolink Orange station. More mpg, and mp4 movies. You may need Quicktime to view mp4 files. |
|
| May 22, 2005 |
| There are some new mp4 movies of San Pedro Red Car and Los Angeles Metro Blue Line. I have also deleted some of the broken links |
|
| Feb 19, 2005 |
| 2004 was a busy year with me doing Cold Fusion consulting work in Los Angeles and San Diego. I still hope to do a site upgrade |
|
| Mar 14, 2003 |
| Alive and kicking. After a few days being down the site is on a new and improved server. |
|
| Jan 3, 2002 |
| 2001 was a bit of a slow year for Transit Rider, but not for me! I have turned my focus on developing a generalized content management system. This will allow others to create and manage their website from a web browser. The name of this product is Springboard and I hope to sell lots of copies of it! |
|
| Visit www.jamsoftware.org |
|
| Oct 8, 2001 |
| Around November 1995, HTML 2.0 became an official IETF standard. It included most of the things that browsers supported at the time and also some things that were not. In particular, the <link> tag was supposed to do all sorts of interesting things. Browsers were supposed to provide some sort of navigation method based on this tag. Netscape and IE never supported this tag, until now.
|
|
| Over the past few days Mozilla has added support for the "linkbar". To view link bar items, you must also go to a site with link data. You will find that they are few and far between. What would you expect? This use of this tag has been ignored for years. I can point you the way to a site that does use it. |
|
| Transit Rider has always used some of the latest technology. This site uses PNG images, not GIFs, it was an early adopter of XHTML 1.0. It moved to XHTML 1.1 on the day of its release. Now it is one of the few sites to use the link tag. For all users of the latest build of Mozilla, have fun. (Sorry Netscape 6.1 is not quite new enough) |
|
| Sep 15, 2001 |
Some good things have been happening lately. The technology behind Transit Rider has been applied in new and interesting ways. Currently there are four web sites that are running on a program called Springboard. Think of Springboard as the commercial version of Transit Rider
Springboard includes a photo library, a links manager, a file manager, a calendar, a page manager, and a mailing list. It provides a springboard to for small companies to create newer and better web sites. |
|
| Aug 1, 2001 |
| This site is for sale! The whole thing pages, images, database, whole thing! For futher information please email james@transit-rider.com |
|
| Jul 17, 2001 |
| The links section has just past the 500 entries mark. Upon reviewing the stats, I see that there is about a 25% chance that those that search find something. Here are some suggestions to increase your chances of success. |
|
| Only use the vehicle type section if you only want an agency that operates that type of vehicle. If you check bus, light rail, heavy rail, commuter rail, and ferry you will not get much. In fact the only agency that operates all of these is MBTA in Boston. |
|
| State and Provinces are good choices but in some cases they may be too general. Cities are also good. Some agencies are named after counties so that works too.
|
|
| Searching on streets is just not supports Words like the, to, fares, info, and bus just don't work well. Searching on "Bus info" just does not help. Route numbers not supported either You will either get everything or nothing. |
|
| Jun 29, 2001 |
| Once again the job hunt is on. If anyone is looking for an experienced Cold Fusion, XHTML, CSS developer with a background in Human Resources applications, here I am in Orange County. Let me know if you have anything interesting. |
|
| May 31, 2001 |
| Version 3.5 of the site has two new things. The search functionality and XHTML 1.1 conformance. The Search button allows for searching on internal contents and links to agencies all over the place. This includes agencies not on Transit Rider. All agencies no matter how big or small are all going to be listed |
|
| XHTML 1.1 came out today. From the time it was released until the time this site conformed, was about 2 hours. I know that some visitors of the site have a problem with W3 standards conformance vs. browser conformance. All I can say is if this puts one more nail in the Netscape 4.x coffin, I am glad to put it in. |
|
| If there are any other site usability issues, as always, let me know! |
|
| May 21, 2001 |
| It is time to try something different. The Internet is lacking a definative list of hyperlinks to transit agencies. There are some that have a lot of links, but they are not searchable. With a couple of tweaks, the Transit Rider database now supports that information. All that is needed are the links themselves. |
Go...
|
| With that in mind, I am looking all over the Internet for transit agencies in the United States and Canada. If there are any that you know of, or are having difficulty finding one that serves your area, let me know. I have 250 or so entries now. As soon as I hit 1000, I am putting a search text box on every page. I think that this is going to be fun |
|
| May 8, 2001 |
| The Internet is still a strange place. Would anyone like to guess what my most popular page is?Perhaps it is for the largest transit system? Is it for a really big rail system? Is it a page with a lot of photos or links?. Is it the page with my photo on it? My resume? Something about trains? Buses? |
|
| If you guessed any of the above, you are wrong. The most popular page, with nearly 30% of the daily traffic, is ... (Drumroll please) is a DEAD Page. In particular, www.transit-rider.com/losangeles (please don't visit it, it is already quite popular) |
|
| May 5, 2001 |
| Every once in a while something really different comes along. Today is one of those days. You can ride San Francisco MUNI streetcars along the waterfront to Fisherman's Wharf. You can ride the San Diego Trolley along the Bayfront. You can ride Coaster along the Coast. Heck you can even ride BART underwater. |
Go...
|
| It is time for the City of Los Angeles to get into the act. A few day ago I visited the construction site for the Waterfront Red Car Line. When completed to will be an interesting addition to local transit system |
|
| Apr 19, 2001 |
| New feature. I have improved the search utility on the site. Previously only images could be searched, now agencies can too. Enter in some criteria and back will come matches for Transit Rider AND external links. |
Go...
|
| Just click on search on the left and try it out! |
|
| Apr 17, 2001 |
| I can't believe it. I was sifting through my stuff and I found a whole disc worth of stuff that I never added to the site. Expect some new MUNI photos coming soon. They are really good. I even have a shot of MUNI car 1 |
Go...
|
| Apr 4, 2001 |
| Another expanded FAQ |
|
| Why are some cities included and others are not? The answer is quite simple. If I can afford to go to where ever, I go. If I can't, I don't. I am based out of California so places like say Boston, MA are a bit out my reach. I currently have 3 maxed out credit cards and no food in the refrig. (Hey W, where is my tax cut?) While I would love to have some baked beans, I am sure I cannot afford that either. |
|
| No, don't send photos. I only use my own photos. I promise that I will someday be rich and famous and I will visit every city with a bus in the United States AND Canada. But until then... |
|
| Thank you for your understanding ;-) |
|
| Apr 1, 2001 |
| In the interest of making the site faster and less confusing, I am seriously considering removing the "edit" page functionality from the site. The functionality provides the ability to do some basic changes to the pages. |
|
| The problem is for every page generation request, I have to check about a dozen flags. The site then has to process all the logic to figure out what must be shown. Only about 2% of the people who come to the site even try it. I am not sure how much it adds to the user experience. |
|
| FYI: This functionality was orginally done as a demonstration project. The need for such a demonstation has long faded. If anyone has any comments on it please let me know! |
|
| Mar 27, 2001 |
| My do people get bent out of shape easily these days. Even though it is in the FAQ section, I will shed some light on why this site does not work with Netscape 4.x. Netscape 4.x is a very broken product that unfortunately 10% of the people out there are still using. I could get a good paying job just to get Netscape to cooperate, but for my personal site, I would rather conform to W3 standards |
|
| Mar 17, 2001 |
| Coaster (San Diego) information has been moved to NCTD. Why? It is a service of NCTD as opposed to a separate agency. The trains are painted the same way as the buses |
Go...
|
| Mar 10, 2001 |
| First some sad news. The worderful company I worked for, iSearch, no longer is. I would just like to say that it has been an honor working with such great people for the past two years. It is sad to go our separate ways. |
|
| By the way if there are any employers out there who need some one with a background in Cold Fusion and / or Human Resources web application developement, I know some one who could use a job right now ;-). |
|
| I did make it to St. Louis and I have the photos to prove it. I must say that of all the cities I have been to, St. Louis had the most polite people I have ever met. I very much enjoyed visiting your city. |
Go...
|
| Jan 28, 2001 |
| I got some new information on Santa Clarita Transit and the site has had some random improvements here and there. One thing that I would like to add is more links to agency, schedules, unofficial, and job boards. If you know of any please let me know. |
Go...
|
| Jan 4, 2001 |
| I got a couple of days off between Christmas and New Years so I headed to Las Vegas for a few days. It has been a while since I have visited an all bus city and I was not disappointed. They had all sorts of interesting buses, especially NABI low floor and articulated buses. |
Go...
|
| I also have tickets lined up for St. Louis in March and Dallas in April. It looks like this year is starting out on the right foot. |
|
| Dec 15, 2000 |
| As Transit Rider ends its third year and begins its forth I would like to thank every one who comes to this site. Without you it would not be be half as fun as it is. I would like to especially thank those that catch my mistakes. Hey I am a programmer not a tech writer! |
|
| Nov 26, 2000 |
| Lot of progress has been made during Thanksgiving weekend. The site engine still has some bugs, but December looks like a good release date. Denver will be the newest featured city. |
Go...
|
| Siemens, makers of the San Diego Trolley and others, recently signed up with a small Los Angeles based company called iSearch for their job posting needs. I am very proud to say at Lead HTML developer for iSearch, I played a small part in making that site possible. |
Go...
|
| I was not involved in the sale, so I cannot claim that Transit Rider was instrumental in the sale. Still I am impressed with how small the world is. |
|
| Oct 25, 2000 |
| It is extremely busy at work. I have no time to work on Transit Rider. |
|
| Oct 4, 2000 |
| iSearch sent me to Denver to do some work. I insisted that they fly me out two days early. I had a great time taking photos all over the place. |
Go...
|
| Jul 30, 2000 |
| Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and Baltimore have been eye sores on the site long enough. These are scans of old images which were not of very high quality. They will not be present when the next version of the site is released |
|
| Jun 29, 2000 |
| Quote of the moment: "Solving traffic problems by building more freeways is like curing someone's cocaine addiction by giving him a wider straw." |
|
| Elson Trinidad |
|
| May 23, 2000 |
| First I would like to thank everyone who participated in the the recent poll. I carefully read each and everyone one, I learn a lot about what visitors to this site are looking for. There have been many improvements to the site, let me highlight a few. |
|
| (1) There are about 20 or so new or improved agency pages. (2) Over 100 new images. |
|
| (2) Over 100 new images. The main pages for each region now include hyperlinks to agencies. |
|
| (3) Virtually every page is customizable to include as little or as much information as desired. Just click on "edit" or "X |
|
| (4) Newer, better database schema |
|
| (5) The bus, light rail, and heavy rail section accurately reflect the agency pages |
|
| (6) Newer graphics here and there |
|
| Apr 2, 2000 |
| It is time for an ambitious project. I am going to build per-user customizations so that each and every user get exactly what they want when they come to the site. |
|
| Mar 19, 2000 |
| Transit Rider has not had a poll for a while. After reviewing this site, please send in comments on how Transit Rider can serve you better. |
|
| Feb 2, 2000 |
| There are now photos of MTA Metro Red Line to Hollywood. Hollywood / Vine, Hollywood / Western, Vermont / Beverly, and Wilshire / Vermont Stations are all featured. Metro Blue Line Artesia Station has also been added. In less interesting news, Slowly but surely all PhotoCD and PictureCD images are being reprocessed to exactly 640 x 401. |
Go...
|
| Jan 21, 2000 |
| As Transit Rider moves into its third year, the architectural foundation of the site once again gets upgraded. CSS 1.0 reduced the need to use FONT and ALIGN tags. CSS 2.0 provides better methods for overall page layout. Rather than using TABLE to hold the entire structure of a page, DIV is used to separate the page into various regions. The result is faster loading pages that and support for overLIB hover information. |
|
| Dec 24, 1999 |
| I took a real quick trip to San Francisco a couple days back. There are some new photos of Forest Hill Station and N Judah. N Judah has also been divided into 3 pages. In the History section, all of the pages are live. Click on your favorite old version of the site. Last but not least the image query engine has been enhanced. You can now view all images via this method, not just the first 100. |
Go...
|
| Dec 17, 1999 |
| HTML 4.0 has been a W3O standard for 2 years. HTML 4.01 is currently a work in progress which attempts to make HTML into an instance of XML. Transit Rider uses HTML 4.0 for all pages |
|
| Dec 2, 1999 |
| www.transit-rider.com Domain has been active for 2 years. |
|
| Nov 5, 1999 |
| The second phase of the conversion of the site to Cold Fusion has been complete. The first phase converted all the files from htm to cfm and allowed for dynamic assembly of the pages. This layed the foundation for the second part, a database driven website. |
|
| Rather than being a large site with static images, Transit Rider is now a site that can pull its data from a single location. This allows for greater consistancy, quicker updates, and search capabilities. Two things to watch out for are the "New" logo and the "Cool" logo. Whenever an image is show, the system is queried for the image's date and whether it is cool. |
|
| Sep 14, 1999 |
| Transit Rider no longer uses GIF images, only PNGs and JPGs. UNISYS claims ownership of LZW compression which is used in GIF images. UNISYS has claimed at various times the right to charge for the use of GIF images. This is an old story, but it is back. Click here for UNISYS policy staight from their site. Transit Rider will NEVER pay anyone for the right to use GIF images. Users will have to upgrade to IE 4.0 and higher and Netscape 4.04 and higher to have PNG image support. |
|
| Aug 19, 1999 |
| After 4 months of development, Transit Rider is back! First phase of Cold Fusion Development is completed. Entire site is built with CFINCLUDE and Custom Tags |
|
| Aug 1, 1999 |
| Transit Rider takes over 3000 files to implement. Besides MASSIVE conversion process, there really is not much to report. The first iteration of the Cold Fusion version of the site will not use the database connectivity. It will be using numerous CFINCLUDES and custom tags. |
|
| Jun 19, 1999 |
| I renamed it Version 2.0 just for the fun of it. The "Photo Library" pages for the site have been completed. They include information on the mapping from the old numbering system to the new one. The small regions have been converted. San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Vehicles, the largest and most trafficked part of the site are next. With a little luck the conversion will be done by the end of next month. |
|
| I just sent in 180 negatives to be processed. When I went to the store, I noted that PhotoCD is no longer actively marketed. I wrote all over the place that I wanted PhotoCD so I should still get them. Last but not least, FAQ work is being started |
|
| May 22, 1999 |
| Version 5.0 development: The massive effort to get Transit Rider using Cold Fusion is under way. Since every page is dynamically created, every page must be redone. All for tradional HTML headers and footers along with FrontPage specific material must be sifted and removed. The result is few files that are much smaller. A tighter control on consistency is also possible.
all of the old "set" photos from 01 to 35 have been reprocessed onto Photo CD. Even a few set9x photos have been upgraded. |
|
| Mar 28, 1999 |
| Inland Empire becomes the first major site that I have created not using FrontPage. I have created a few sites with NetObjects Fusion but the bulk has always been with FrontPage 98. The material on the Inland Empire has been migrated to Cold Fusion. |
Go...
|
| Mar 21, 1999 |
| About 99% of pages now do not have left frame. Top navigation replaced on most pages |
|
| Mar 15, 1999 |
| Thing have really come full circle here. After noting that many users are not clicking on small images, I have decided to include a note on the bottom of evey page to click on them. Also I have un-thumbnailed the better images. Futhermore pages are being convered from 3 frame to 2 frame pages. The previous left frame is now the left shared border. This allows for more items to be listed and more importantly, more things to be listed. |
|
| Riverside and San Bernardino have been merged to form Inland Empire. Alameda and Contra Costa are now East Bay. A few WIFs have been added to San Diego. San Diego has an experimental initial page. The new top navigation bar has JavaScript hover buttons |
Go...
|
| Mar 5, 1999 |
| Latest batch of PhotoCD have arrived. There is continued experimentation on the site structure. There will definately be an emphasis on adding links to scheduling information for those who need it. |
|
| Feb 19, 1999 |
| Version 4.4 San Diego section of the site has newer format for navigation on page. New disclaimers have been put on the bottom of San Diego and Root. I now am trying out ICQ |
Go...
|
| Jan 28, 1999 |
| Version 4.3 Being that I have no job and hence no money, the site has seen few improvements for a while. Fortuately there is a new supply of material that just came in. These include:
Metrolink in Orange County, Riverside County, and Los Angeles County OCTA and Laguna Beach Transit in Orange County Coaster and NCTD and NCTD in San Diego County |
|
| All of these were very welcome improvements. Many of the existing photos were old poor scans. All of the new ones are straight off of a PhotoCD. Speaking of PhotoCD, about 25% of the Bay Area material has been reprocessed and is now on PhotoCD it will take a while, but look forward to some very clear pictures of MUNI streetcars.
Last but not least, LACMTA has been moved back to a subfolder of Los Angeles. This means that a lot of the search engine links to the Blue Line, Red Line, and Green Line are broken. I know that Infoseek has been corrected, the others may take longer.
|
|
| Dec 12, 1998 |
| Version 4.2 FrontPage 2000 beta sux. Back to using FrontPage 98. Java script used for standard navigation. |
|
| Nov 24, 1998 |
| Version 4.1 beta: Parts of the site have been updated with FrontPage 2000 beta. CSS has been used instead of Java for hover effect. |
|
| Oct 23, 1998 |
| Old Pueblo Trolley and Sun Trans in Tucson, AZ have been added to the site. The Old Pueblo Trolley is a fine historic operation with a Japanese streetcar. Additional cars are also being rehabilitated. With there addition comes the end of the new material for this phase of Transit Rider. There will be additional text added, and enhancements will be made to improve search engine visibility. Still what the site needs to be it has become. The purpose of the site is not to have a photo of everything transit related. Its purpose it to give a good taste of what these transit systems are and what they have to offer. |
Go...
|
| Transit Rider has more that 900 photographs, is over 100 pages and is over 50MB. It is the result of over a year of continuous effort, thousands of miles traveled, and scores of rolls of film. It has been greatly enhanced with feedback many individuals, most notably Ian Fuller of Ian Fuller's Vehicles Home Page. There is still more to come, but what exactly that will be has yet to be determined.
|
|
| Oct 21, 1998 |
| V4.02 Alternate text added to thumbnail images for better indexing on Lycos |
|
| Oct 19, 1998 |
| San Diego has new material and navigation bars. San Diego Trolley East Line is now the featured site. All portions of the site have either 4.0 or 4.01 graphics. |
Go...
|
| Oct 16, 1998 |
| V4.01 gradient fill added to top navigation. All portions except San Diego, Sacramento, and Vehicles have 4.0 treatment. Feedback form and folder removed. Pages will now have email address and link. Ventura County material went up |
|
| Oct 13, 1998 |
| LACMTA and Orange County have received the V. 4.0 treatment. Two new CDs have been processed. Both Orange County and LACMTA have new photos. All other photos have been processed. |
Go...
|
| Oct 10, 1998 |
| V 4.0 Graphics for root web changed as was format of home page and sitemap (a.k.a. TOC and search page) Java used for hover buttons and CSS for text links. Text links revised to go directly into major transit systems. |
|
| Sep 29, 1998 |
| v3.41 HotBot submission form fixed. Search renamed TOC on navigation bars |
|
| Sep 25, 1998 |
| Foothill Transit, Metrolink, and Santa Clarita all have new material. Transit system logos are being added as are simple navigation bars. The Vehicles and Manufacturer's section is no longer in beta. |
|
| Sep 23, 1998 |
| Riverside separated from Los Angeles. New material on Metrolink La Sierra and RTA |
Go...
|
| Sep 21, 1998 |
| Version 3.4 top navigation is only text links. Hover effect via CSS |
|
| Sep 20, 1998 |
| Version 3.32 top navigation bars text now has links. Color set to black via CSS. Transit Agency logos added |
|
| Sep 18, 1998 |
| Version 3.31 Additional PNGs added to California counties |
|
| Sep 10, 1998 |
| A large supply of new material for Sacramento Regional Transit District (RT) has been added. All the new high quality images came off of Photo CD. Included are Siemens-Duewag U2A light rail vehicles, Orion V, and Gillig Phantom buses in the California state capital. (For those of you out in Rio Linda, this means I visited your area). Also added: San Diego NCTD New Flyer D40LF, Metrolink train in San Diego County, YoloBus in Sacramento, Vallejo Transit Baylink in Sacramento |
Go...
|
| Sep 5, 1998 |
| Version 3.3 is now in effect. Cascading style sheets and all systems are split by county including Bay Area. Temporary place holders have been created. This may be awkward for systems such as BART which serve 4 counties. But this will be worked on. Also the search engines need to be notified of this change. |
Go...
|
| Aug 25, 1998 |
| Orange County has been separated from Los Angeles. Contra Costa County has been separated from the Bay Area. Eventually all systems will be on a per county basis (with allowances for routes which cross county lines. This will allow easier improvements in the future. |
|
| For greater consistency, Cascading Style Sheets are being introduced. Orange County also has a new section on Balboa Island Ferry. A new vehicles section is being started. Vehicles will be sorted by manufacturer, model, and style. |
Go...
|
| Aug 2, 1998 |
| Transit Rider - Los Angeles has another set of new photos this time it focuses on Foothill Transit, LADOT, and Metrolink. Other systems have a few new photos too. Transit Rider San Diego and Los Angeles have the same graphics as Transit Rider Root. This leaves the Bay Area with a slightly different scheme. |
|
| Jul 20, 1998 |
| Transit Rider - Los Angeles has about 60 new photos. Most of the transit systems have new material systems, but Torrance Transit is much improved. There is also a section on New Flyer D40LF low floor buses. |
Go...
|
| Jul 14, 1998 |
| A new feature on the site is the History of Public Transportation. This is the first iteration but more details will come.
P.S. I know about the dead links on the search engines. I am working on them :-) |
|
| Jul 6, 1998 |
| Version 3.0 is now completed on all the sites except Transit Rider Bay Area. The Phases are as follows: Phase 0.5 was when I had a subdirectory off of the www.dehavenconstruction.com site. In the interest of both that site and this site, all of the public transportation material was removed in about November '97. |
|
| The brand new Transit Rider site went up and was dubbed 1.0. At the time, it had all of the photos in existence. This site was also fully submitted to all the search engines in February. As time march on many weaknesses became apparent. Having full size images, meant that all of the images could not be too large nor could they be Photo Soap high quality. |
|
| So just as soon as the site when up, I had to redo it with thumbnails hence version 1.5. This is how the site stayed for most of spring. Still profound problem still existed. FrontPage can build a strict hierarchical site easily. The information at hand is not hierarchical. Not all of the photos are worthy of being on the site. Lastly have 1 site with everything makes management of the site unwieldy. |
|
| Version 2.0 began as a major patch but later involved building 3 beta site from scratch. After careful consideration, and input from others, I settled on a design and rebuild Transit Rider - Bay Area (only), with custom FrontPage graphics and a lot of overriding its default structure. Originally the site was going to have a black background, and the graphics were made with that in mind. After some strong feedback, I changed it to white, but some of the graphics still reflect the original intent. |
|
| I was very pleased with the results, so I did preparatory work for Transit Rider - San Diego. San Diego took a different turn. I knew that it would not be black, and I knew that I was going to San Diego to get new photos. When I did get the photos, they were ready to be placed into prebuilt pages. |
|
| Transit Rider - Los Angeles also got a quick facelift, but since I had no new material, I held off on it. Transit Rider Root (The collective name for everything else) had grown very small. The Bay Area, San Diego, and Los Angeles were separate sites. Still the home page and related pages need to look good. Rather than repeat the same treatment as the Bay Area and San Diego, I did something real bold. |
|
| Transit Rider - Root got the pages build into frames and frame sets. This became version 3.0. I experimented with frames on the DeHaven site a long time ago, but it was quickly dropped due to the difficulty that search engines have with frames. Transit Rider - Root is very different. It serves as a main page to get to other cities and topics. With this in mind, the frame site you see today was built. |
|
| It was so successful, it was applied to Transit Rider - San Diego (with special consideration for search engines). It is interesting to note that Transit Rider - Los Angeles was in version 1.5 while Root and San Diego were at 3.0. I gathered the Los Angeles material, and cut out all the junk, and put what little new stuff I had. All this leaves us with Transit Rider - Bay Area.
Transit Rider - Bay Area is being built right now. It will have a somewhat more intensive use of graphics, but all of the FrontPage graphics will be remove. Also junk pages, and images are being removed. |
|
| Jun 25, 1998 |
| Transit Rider - San Diego is completed. One of the newer features in it are Portable Network Graphics (PNG). For users are not yet capable of viewing PNG, there are alt images included with each one. PNG is a lossless compression that supports 32bit color. PNG is intended to replace GIFs. |
Go...
|
| Transit Rider also has a few Wavelet Image Files (WIF) images. You will need a plug in to see them, but it well worth the time. WIF have higher compression than JPGs and less harsh artifacts. |
|
| Both the PNG and WIF efforts on this site are to enable faster graphics and richer content. As soon as 80% of users are capable of viewing PNG, this site will get a major graphics overhaul. This is a friendly reminder to upgrade to IE 4.0 or higher or Netscape 4.04 or higher. If you have any questions about PNG or WIF let me know. |
|
| Jun 13, 1998 |
| The new Transit Rider - San Diego Site is about 75% completed. As such it is being sent up. It has some rough edges to it though. The best new parts include Coast Express Rail, expanded San Diego Transit coverage, MTS, and 2000 Series LRVs. |
|
| The Angels Flight, the World's Shortest Railway, can be found at Transit Rider - Los Angeles. Transit Rider - Los Angeles also received a face lift. |
Go...
|
| May 28, 1998 |
| 72 photos were taken in Los Angeles of the Blue Line, Green Line, Red Line, Angels Flight, and Metrolink. Transit Rider - San Diego has been set up and its key pages have been put in place. Within the next week I will be heading to San Diego and collect new material. The goal is to have over 400 photos of which about 200 will be used. I also have a copy of NetObjects Fusion 3.0. In the more distant future it will be used to build a new site for Sacramento. |
Go...
|
| Apr 24, 1998 |
| New and Improved Transit Rider - Bay Area is up! |
Go...
|
| Apr 10, 1998 |
| Education comes first. This site will be put on the back burner for a while :-(. The new Bay Area site should be done at the end of May as should www.transit.nu
|
|
| Mar 20, 1998 |
| While my initial goals have been achieved, I know realize that I needed to spend more time on the quality rather that the quantity of the information contained here in. I am currently working on making the site have a more consistent look and feel and be easier to navigate. This is not a patch of the existing site, but a completely new site with newly scanned photos and a totally new page format. |
|
| Feb 13, 1998 |
| I have fought an rejected the idea of thumb nails for as long as I have built websites. I have resisted them with all of my strength. Before I read your email today, I spent three hours enhancing, de-enhancing, and scaling. I calibrated my scanner I copied back and forth between Microsoft Photo Editor and Kai's Photo Soap. I built an Excel spreadsheet and a chart correlating data file sizes to quality. |
|
| After all this I can resist no more. I am like Napoleon at Waterloo. I have no option but to surrender. What was the straw that broke the camels back? I kept trying to get the over head wires for streetcars and trolley buses to look OK. They would not do it unless I had enormous image sizes. The next site wide change will be to use thumbnails for everything.
|
|
| Feb 2, 1998 |
| At 3:30 a.m. I returned from the Bay Area. I had a very productive three days. All of BART except for three stations have been photographed. MUNI J and K are also finished. C, PM, F, L, and M and many bus lines have additional material. AC Transit and Golden Gate Transit are going to look better. CCCTA was having a strike so that will not be improved. |
Go...
|
| I should have all the images scanned in about two weeks. Two weeks after that they should be in JPEG format. Two weeks after that they should be incorporated into web pages. |
|
| Jan 26, 1998 |
| First software review completed for OS/2. |
|
| Based on results on some of the CJR Construction sites, the site will have additional control buttons. Rather than having back and next on the bottom, all the pages on the current level will be listed on the side. Many of the images have been cropped to decrease screen space and improve load times. |
|
| Attempting to standardize the look and feel of each page and to get every page to look right on a 800 pixel wide screen. The webmasterÂ’s corner will now be developed with NetObjects Fusion rather than FrontPage 98.
|
|
| Dec 31, 1997 |
| All images converted to JPEG. About 100 images not yet tied to a page. Site ftp to server and is online! Upon checking Alta Vista, it becomes apparent that meta tags will have to be used to control the abstract. Most of San Diego is up. Los Angeles is next. |
|
| Dec 1, 1997 |
| The following is a list of the materials I currently have:
80 photos from San Diego County.
120 photos of Los Angeles and Orange County
100 old photos of the Bay Area
135 new photos of the Bay Area (taken August 97)
50 photos from Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and Baltimore.
Copy the Webmaster's corner of the DeHaven site. |
|
| At this point in time the highest priority is to have all the photos scanned at 800 x 600 bitmaps, zipped, converted to JPEG, and copied to zip disks. The reason that I use bitmaps, is because they are a no loss format, and can be zipped to a slightly smaller size. I had scanned and gone straight to JPEG, but whenever I needed to touchup the images, they left horrible artifacts. I use the zip disk so that I do not consume 500MB on my hard drive. |
|
| Another thing, much of the material I have is dated. For the sake of completion and relevance, I expect to update everything. This is especially true of Sacramento. If this happens there will be an even longer delay.
|
|
