New public transport information site

Mrs OBumble

Announcing .... www.GalwayTransport.info

This is a new site that aims to have information about all scheduled public transport operating to, from and through Galway.

It doesn't do fancy stuff like journey planning, and aims to point you to other places rather than re-produce content.

It grew out of frustration that there was no useful map of Galway City buses, and that I needed to learn to use Blogger and Google maps for another project but wanted something to practice on first. (This set of maps has now grown bigger than my other project will be!)

There are still some missing bits (eg detailed route maps for City Direct) and map errors, but I decided that I needed to get some publicity/feedback before investing any more time.

I'm very open to ideas about what else to add, thoughts I've had include car-parks, taxi offices, bicycle lanes ... 'tis just a matter of what to do first. There are email-addresses on the site for where to send feedback.

And thanks to a couple of boards.ie members who've given me helpful feedback so far. Some issues (eg tables!) are still giving me grief but hopefully will get there soon.

BJohnson

Looks like you're off to a good start! This is a great idea for a web site. It's a shame that Bus Èireann doesn't have a map of their routes on their own site.

One thing I would suggest is increasing the size of the Google Map on each page to better fill the space. I was checking out your source code and found this line:

scrolling="no" width="425" frameborder="0" height="350"

This determines the height and width of your Google Map. Play around with those values to increase the size and make it a better fit for the page. I haven't used Blogger before, but I just put together a simple website for our surgery using Squarespace and had to learn a bit about configuring Google Maps. If Blogger doesn't let you change the settings in a simple way, you can always edit the HTML manually. That's what I had to do. You can see an example from our page here:

http://www.knocknacarramedicalcentre.ie/location/

Here's a like from Google that I found useful in modifying maps:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/index.html

Hope that helps.

Brian

biko

Great work Mary!

jkforde

Good on ya.... some cosmetic typo stuff...

Should Route BE7 - Woodquay, Terryland, Tirellan, Crestwood, Ballinfoyle, Bóthar an Chóiste be in the 'East of the Corrib' section? [http://www.galwaytransport.info/2009/07/city-bus-services.html]

Keep at it and we'll try to spread the word on here

Das Kitty

Great stuff Mary! Fair play.

Sea Devils

Nicely done. Good job on setting it all up!

Mrs OBumble

jkforde wrote: »

Should Route BE7 - Woodquay, Terryland, Tirellan, Crestwood, Ballinfoyle, Bóthar an Chóiste be in the 'East of the Corrib' section? [http://www.galwaytransport.info/2009/07/city-bus-services.html]

Oops! (It's funny, I've always thought of it as a "west" bus 'cos it shares the start of the route with other west ones. But thinking about it ... duh!).

Thanks for all the tips: the more I think about it, the more there is that I could do. The fun bit now is about managing my time between this and the next venture.

Mrs OBumble

This is kinda cheeky, but I'm gonna give it a try:

I've put a poster on the site (in http://www.galwaytransport.info/2008/12/galwaytransport.html), and would really love some help getting it onto noticeboards in larger workplaces around town.

I'm getting around various public places, but there are a lot of spots that I simply don't have access to due to security etc.

Any help gratefully received.

Buglim

Looks great and badly needed.

ScumLord

You should have a look at the joomla CMS software it's much more powerful and flexible peice of software. The hardest part is setting it up but after that it's a breeze to make really cool looking sites.

It's a great idea for a site and you've all the content made I just think it would look better in the likes of a joomla shell.

Mrs OBumble

You're right, it does look kinda ugly.

I've put that to the fact that the things I'm good at soooooo don't include graphic-design. Does a CMS help with that, or just make it easier to keep track of the content?

Will keep the CMS suggestion in mind, but not sure that I'll be doing anything about it in a hurry: moving it out of blogger (et al) means paying for hosting (as well as the conversion time) and I'm not sure that it's going to be worthwhile (donating my time is one thing, donating cash is quite another).
(That said, some days blogger is a horrible development environment. And I'm finding some bugs in google maps too ... I'm remembering why I'm a BA not a developer!)

I loaded a better version of the summary map this morning: it now has the route numbers in the zooming version too, and they have links to the actual route maps (thanks to whoever above suggested that one!)

ScumLord

CMS can be as easy as letting the software do everything all you do is load the content (I'd say blogger is just CMS software at it's heart) but it's very easy to go beyond that. It's the modules and extensions that you can download off the main site that make it so great. If you want to put a forum on the site you just download the forum module and install it from the admin and hey presto you have a forum without needing to know any coding. There's even google map modules, video modules, picture gallery modules, just about anything you can think of.

Some hosting providers have include the option in administration to automatically install the likes of joomla so you don't even need to know how to set it up but that means paying for hosting. Most CMS software is free.

The hosting I have currently is only €9 a month so it won't break the bank and they have an option for installing joomla automatically.

It's a good idea for a site and something like joomla could turn it into a good community site if you stuck a forum on there so everyone could complain about the buses.

If you need any help setting it up I could walk you through it.

snubbleste

Nice press release about it in the advertiser today