Change Log

This is a record of planned and completed updates; feedback appreciated: nick@ottergoose.com.

High priority improvements

• Tag highest scoring images in geographic grid (perhaps ID highest-scoring images at resoltuion of 7.5, 5, 2.5, 1, 0.5 deg of lat/lon) to reduce clumping and improve render times when viewing large areas
• Place search (OpenStreetMaps? OpenRailwayMaps?)
• Date filtering
• Auto-prune logs

Maybe someday improvements

• Refine mobile UI
• Google Earth Plugin/Layer?
• Gallery of recently added photos?
• Gallery of top photos added each week?
• Free/open satellite basemap layer

Completed changes

January 26, 2025

• Added ~250 groups
• Lots of tweaks to photo ingest process, including:
  • daily scans for new photos in all monitored groups
  • deep scan of Railfan Atlas group (entire group rescanned daily)
  • long-term deep scans of all groups (monthly+ basis for larger groups)
• Added privacy troubleshooting steps to help page
• Add logic to prevent duplicate groups from being added to database
• Improved loading times when viewing large areas

January 22, 2025 - Railfan Atlas 3

• Switched from Google Maps to Leaflet / OpenRailwayMap / OpenStreetMap / OpenFreeMap
• Removed as many third-party assets as possible, including Adobe, Google and Bootstrap CDN - should improve performance and privacy
• Refactored front-end to vanilla JS; RIP jQuery!
• Gulp workflow to combine, compress, and cache bust assets
• Upgraded server infrastructure

December 30, 2024

• Fixed error that prevent mobile menu from opening

June 28, 2023

• Removed Google Analytics and Google jQuery CDN
• Removed location search; TL;DR: search with autocomplete is $$$$

Mar 19, 2018

• Lots of under the hood updates to the API fetching scripts to improve memory use on new server.

Nov 6, 2016

• Grab latest uploads from all groups on every refresh
• Refresh info on images uploaded in last 24 hours

Nov 4, 2016

• Track Date/Time Uploaded/Taken (will take a while for all 1.6 million records to update)
• Cache percentile data to waste less time on each fetch cycle

Oct 16, 2016

• Setup SSL Cert to fix GPS support
• Reformat change log to date+list
• Update share thumbnail

Apr 19, 2016

• Disable "hide last row" option in thumbnail view so all images in extent can always be shown.

Nov 24, 2015

• Faster server in New York
• Additional thumbnails in extent option?
• Colorblind-safe heatmap colors

Nov 2, 2015

• Prevent over-zooming on search locations
• Fix photographer select name in Safari

Aug 2, 2015

• Work-around Flickr's 4,000 image / result set limit
• Improve efficiency of percentile/score initialization
• Video with instructions for adding to map

Jul 23, 2015

• Fix thumbnails scrollbar in thumnbnail in IE
• Lazyload author avatars in dropdown menu

Jul 18, 2015

• Increase number of thumbnails

Jul 17, 2015

• Tune & optimize the DB (see: MySQL Latitude/Longitude Indexing)

Jul 16, 2015

• Build optimized heatmap array on server-end

Jul 6, 2015

• Update URL on position change to make linkable / bookmarkable locations
• Update the help page; break-out change-log to its own page
• Setup with Git

May 1, 2015

• Update group scanning to systematically crawl entire group rather than take random sample

Apr 25, 2015

• Build a stats overview page

Apr 17, 2015

• Remove the small number of redundant photos and photographers

Apr 8, 2015

• Update score mechanism to reflect number of photos photographer has in the Railfan Atlas database

Mar 20, 2015

• More tweaks to import process to find more photos

Mar 18, 2015

• Correct photo / photographer counts on this page to reflect actual number of unique
• Verify there aren't any duplicate photo or photographer entries in the database as a result of overlapping import scripts
• More tweaks to the import process.

Mar 17, 2015

• Add logging capability to import process; tweaked slightly to dig deeper into fewer groups when crawling/importing

Mar 15, 2015

• Change order of requests in fetching routine to better utilize hourly allotment of API calls, increase page count limits to cast wider net

Mar 14, 2015

• Fix issues where map extent pass lng of +/-180
• Show more photographers in top filter
• Increase precision of heatmap points when zoomed in very closely
• Show more images when zoomed in extremely close
• Reduce photographer count in menu and number of heatmap points sent to mobile devices

March 8, 2015

• Add photographer count to help page
• Make sure images with over-restrictive privacy settings aren't needlessly wasting API calls
• Re-index all photographers occasionally to make sure thumb / stats are up to date
• Re-index all photos occasionally to make sure thumb / stats are up to date
• Update import scripts to support new data format and start ingesting photos again

Feb 24, 2015

• Heatmap overlay showing location of all photos in extent, not just "most interesting"
• Better control of thumbnail size / count, including on mobile
• Include username if real name isn't specified for thumbnail title attribute

Feb 24, 2015

• Option to display images from a single photographer

May 6, 2014

• Improve anti-clumping sorting by making dependent on viewport dimensions

May 4, 2014

• Enhance the mobile user experience, even though it will always be fairly clunky on older devices
• Loading status indicator
• Zoom into current location via GPS / IP

May 3, 2014

• Search for a place name to switch locations more effectively
• Improve garbage-clearing so out-of-extent markers are always cleared
• Basic anti-clumping sorting to spread out results

Apr 30, 2014 - Railfan Atlas 2

• Move to a blazing fast VPS with an SSD and a couple of dedicated CPUs
• Update Flickr fetching mechanism to reduce database calls
• Import from Search API with random sort parameter

2008: Railfan Atlas 1

• My senior project at the University of Oklahoma, a primitive geo-wiki.