Our hosting bill has come due and the charges have gone up somewhat. Those of you who can are invited to hit the donate button on steamlocomotive.info's front page. All donations will be paid against future hosting charges.

All help will be much appreciated. In the past year I've put in over 900 hours of work on the site, and I do want it to survive. We've thought about running ads, but mostly that just nauseates me. So I'm asking for help. I cannot afford to pay the charges for the site.

With Much Embarrassment,
Doug

I threw a few bucks your way.

Thanks for keeping the site going.

There is nothing to be embarrassed about, because you're facing a reality none of us want to deal with; Donated to the cause, you're doing great work!

Thanks for all of your hard work in keeping this valuable website going. I made a $25 donation. I hope a few others will as well.

Doug, you certainly ARE appreciated, and you have nothing to be embarrassed about. Since I don't ever put my debit card number on these squirrely computers, I'll be sending a check made out to you, to the mailing address on your site. Please advise if there's any reason that won't work.

Thank You and Best of Luck,
Sammy

I'm in as well.

I use your site often, so as thanks, I just set up a monthly donation to the fund. I've been meaning to for a while, and this post was the one to kick my butt into finally doing it.

I am in for $25 as well.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

The future of the site is secured for at least 18 months, and by then I hope to have other means in place to continue its operation.

I'm working on a plan to insure the survival of the site after my demise (not that that is impending, but I'm 73 and have had a couple of heart attacks). I hope to discuss it here in a few weeks.

Some of you may remember that I considered selling the site a couple of years ago, and then did not do so. There were/are multiple reasons for that. And I think that I should explain a bit.

I am (or was) a software engineer, and the website itself, and its administrative interface consist of about 70,000 lines of Coldfusion code, about 5800 lines of Javascript code, and a tiny, tiny bit of Python code.

The site is database driven, which means, for the most part, that the pages you request from the website don't actually exist. The webserver literally creates the pages on the fly using information in our database and streams them to your web browser. The advantage of this, of course, is if I change a piece of data in the database (say the road number of a particular locomotive), the change is reflected instantly throughout the website. The disadvantage, of course, is that a certain amount of database skills (mostly Transact-SQL) are needed to maintain the site. Initially, I was the only person maintaining the site, and I was very, very lazy. I wrote features into the administrative interface that were awkward or annoying to do using SQL, and little else.

When we added our first outside editor, the incomparable Steve Frost from the UK, I began adding to the admin interface to make it easier/more possible for him to perform tasks.

We reached a kind of equilibrium, where I would do things (like mass edits) through the database manager (SSMS, originally) and we could both enter or modify data through the admin interface.

When I considdered selling the site, I had to look at what it would take to maintain, absent the programming and database skills I have, and I was appalled. So I sat down and redesigned the entire admin interface, driving toward a couple of goals:

First, any task necessary to the maintenance of the site, would be achievable in a simple and user-friendly fashion through the admin interface; and
Second, the admin interface needed to be as bulletproof as I could humanly make it. Error detection and correction have been added, and in most cases an error by an admin just produces and set of error messages and helpful hints on how not to do that again. This is still being improved.

So, in redesigning the admin interface I ended up looking closely at the site, and came to the realization that it doesn't do a very good job of presenting the information that it has to the site visitor. I'm working on that too.

I think of the site as a kind of virtual museum, and I want to improve our presentation as I go along.

Thank you for supporting my efforts!

If you all have any criticisms, suggestions or ideas for the website, I would be delighted to listen, and to implement your ideas, where possible.

Warmest Regards,
Doug