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Railpage Australia

URL	http://www.railpage.com.au/
Type of site	Railway enthusiast website
Registration	Free
Owner	Interactive Omnimedia Pty Ltd
Created by

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. Image File history File links Information. ... Shortcut: WP:-( Vandalism is indisputable bad-faith addition, deletion, or change to content, made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia. ... Self-publishing is the publishing of books or other media by those who have written them. ... In historical scholarship, a primary source is a document, or other source of information that was created at or near the time being studied, by an authoritative source, usually one with direct personal knowledge of the events being described. ... Image File history File linksMetadata RPScreen. ... // Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a technical, Web-related term used in two distinct meanings: In popular usage, it is a widespread synonym for Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) — many popular and technical texts will use the term URL when referring to URI; Strictly, the idea of a uniform syntax for... A website (alternatively, Web site or web site) is a collection of Web pages, images, videos and other digital assets that is hosted on a Web server, usually accessible via the Internet or a LAN. A Web page is a document, typically written in HTML, that is almost always accessible... World map exhibiting a common interpretation of Oceania; other interpretations may vary. ...

The site is run by volunteers and operates on hardware that is inadequate to handle the volume of Internet traffic it generates. This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Computer hardware is the physical part of a computer, including the digital circuitry, as distinguished from the computer software that executes within the hardware. ...

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]. A website, Web site or WWW site (often shortened to just site) is a collection of webpages, that is, HTML/XHTML documents accessible via HTTP on the Internet; all publicly accessible websites in existence comprise the World Wide Web. ...

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. Railfans practicing their hobby at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. ... Rail transport in Australia is large, comprising a total of 33,819 km (2,540 km electrified) of track. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... This article or section is not written in the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia article. ...

The discussion forums are divided into separate sections, such as Australian based discussions, heritage interest groups, and overseas discussions. Cultural heritage (national heritage or just heritage) is the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that are inherited from past generations, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations. ...

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. Geoscience Australia is an agency of the Australian federal government. ...

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] The Public Transport Users Association, founded in 1976 as the Train Travellers Association, is a community-based public transport lobby group in Victoria, Australia, based in Melbourne. ... Daniel Bowen is a Melbourne resident best known as the author of the Diary of an Average Australian, one of the first blogs to appear on the World Wide Web. ... Capital Melbourne Government Constitutional monarchy Governor David de Kretser Premier Steve Bracks (ALP) Federal representation  - House seats 37  - Senate seats 12 Gross State Product (2004-05)  - Product ($m)  $222,022 (2nd)  - Product per capita  $44,443/person (5th) Population (End of September 2006)  - Population  5,110,500 (2nd)  - Density  22. ... Scott McGregor (born October 22, 1957) is an Australian actor, television presenter and railway enthusiast. ...

History

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!) Any material which cannot readily be verified may be challenged and removed.

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. Image File history File links Information. ... In computer networking, the Name/Finger protocol and the Finger user information protocol are simple network protocols for the exchange of human-oriented status and user information. ... Note: to create a user account for Wikipedia, go to the login page. ... Robert Menzies Building at the Clayton Campus Monash University is Australias largest university with about 55,000 students. ... Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ... In computer networking, the Name/Finger protocol and the Finger user information protocol are simple network protocols for the exchange of human-oriented status and user information. ...

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. WWWs historical logo designed by Robert Cailliau The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. ... The times of public transport services can be presented as follows: For every public transport line there are two tables (one for each direction), consisting of columns, one for each daily public transport service. ...

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. January 11 is the 11th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... ... phpBB is a popular internet forum package written in the PHP programming language. ...

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. is the 100th day of the year (101st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... shelby was here 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A Web portal is a single point of access to information which is Linked from various logically related internet based applications and of interest to various type of users Portals present information from diverse sources in a unified way. ... A software bug is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e. ...

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. A gigabyte (symbol GB) is a unit of measurement in computers of one thousand million bytes (the same as one billion bytes in the short scale usage). ... In Computer Science, data is often distinguished from code, though both are represented in modern computers as binary strings. ...

Gheringhap Loop

In February 2007, the Australian Federal Department of Transport and Regional Services used information posted in a Railpage hosted site, "Gheringhap Loop" [7],(see also [8]) to produce an information paper entitled "Filling a gap in rail data: an investigation of the Gheringhap Loop train sightings" [9]. The forward to the report states (in part) "Following the growth in private train operations ... rail freight activity data became increasingly scarce. The lack of data can be a challenge for the BTRE in providing the government with timely and accurate information about trends in Australian freight transport. ... In the meantime, the BTRE has investigated other potential data sources, including information from railway enthusiasts." The Department of Transport and Regional Services (DOTARS) is an Australian Government department. ...

Technical

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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. Image File history File links Information. ... Computer hardware is the physical part of a computer, including the digital circuitry, as distinguished from the computer software that executes within the hardware. ...

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. PHP-Nuke is a web based automated news publishing and content management system (a nuke) based on PHP and MySQL. The system is fully controlled using a web-based user interface. ... PHP is a reflective programming language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. ... MySQL (pronounced ) is a multithreaded, multi-user SQL database management system (DBMS)[1] which has, according to MySQL AB, more than 10 million installations. ...

References

March 9 is the 68th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (69th in leap years). ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... March 10 is the 69th day of the year (70th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ...

External links

• Official site
• Original site