I've made a lot of use of this site over the years, planning routes and checking they look ridable on the ground (although looks have proven deceiving more often than not...).
Anyway, they're doing a drive for donations at the moment, a la Wikipedia etc. Seemed a worthy cause so I donated a tenner, their site is slow enough without introducing adverts as well!
http://www.geograph.org.uk/help/donate
"We have to pay for the servers that bring the website to you. We don’t carry advertisements.
If everyone who visits this website today gave £5, we would raise enough funds to keep us going for a year."
Really? I pay for unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, unlimited domains, online support, and flip knows what other bells and whistles, and that costs £180 a year. Do they only get 36 visitors a day, or are they being fleeced?
I suspect that they are storing an awful lot more and using an awful lot more bandwidth than you are
I for one will send them a tenner
I'm happy to donate.
But like Bez do question how much they may be paying. I suspect the 'unlimited' isn't quite...
I suspect that they are storing an awful lot more and using an awful lot more bandwidth than you are
Oh, I've no doubt. But if you're paying for unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth with a decent host (and I realise the importance of that qualification) then that shouldn't be a problem.
That maths assumes a yearly donations drive, I've not seen them asking for donations since I started using the site which was at least 10 years ago. So at least 360 visitors ; )
No, that maths assumes nothing beyond their statement 😉
(BTW, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to piss on their chips, it's a project that's worth donating to, I'm just idly curious about how their numbers stack up.)
As a former server admin, I can tell you there's no such thing as unlimited hosting, quality host or not. It's just a marketing thing to reel in the web amateurs and cheap ****s. With a quality host you'll hit the limit later than some bedroom host, but you'll eventually trigger an over use alert. There's usually something buried in the small print regarding disk/net i/o and cpu usage. Servers and their surrounding infrastructure have finite resources, cpu, connectivity and disk. There ain't an infinite bandwidth fibre port nor an infinite size hard drive. All 'unlimited' hosting packages are massively oversold, they are relying on the vast majority to under use the resources, only takes a few knobs to make everything slow, and a few more to break it.
Thanks for the nudge. I will donate as I use it regularly to scope out routes which may or may not exist on the ground.
Yeah, I realise "unlimited" isn't (especially when it comes to bandwidth), but I'm curious how much you have to ramp up cost before you get enough service to cater for a site like this. I *think* I'm on a fairly reputable host but I'm just wondering what Geograph's hosting must cost; seems like it must be a good couple orders of magnitude more. (Daily visitors in the single thousands doesn't seem wildly optimistic? But equally I can't believe their bandwidth is really enormous… if they had that much traffic I'd hope they'd put a couple of ads on there and pay someone to make it more usable ;))
Never used that site before, but it looks amazing, so just chucked a few quid their way.
The homepage is horrible to use, this page is much better.
They must have enough visitors to cause bandwidth issues as from time to time I get a "this feature is temporarily unavailable".
I'm actually using it mostly for plotting road routes at the moment, Strava will happily send you off down all sorts of farm tracks and Google Map is no better! Still some gaps in streetview also so Geograph to the rescue!
"The homepage is horrible to use, this page is much better."
I suspect if they streamlined their offerings a bit they could make some savings, I really like geograph but I get the feeling whoever is behind it is mildly eccentric with a lot of ideas, I seem to spend half my time navigating onto some other kind of page/map format and trying to get back etc.
Personally I use this offering with the centisquare coverage turned on
http://www.geograph.org.uk/mapper/?t=tolJ5oOXXJ0oOXJLo-NJFoOXXJfoMXXJqobubJL5405olOX8MOZ8MMj4VwM8
Their OS bill must be pretty hefty
Their OS bill must be pretty hefty
Good point, makes sense.
I've been a photo contributor for about 10 years and a regular financial one (tenner a month) for the last year or so. There's been a lot of resistance from regulars there to carrying adverts, so appeals to users for financial help are the next best option. Seem to remember they had a lot of costs a year or two back doing a major server upgrade or replacement exercise, and although there aren't huge ongoing costs to it, it still doesn't come for nowt. I could find some rough figures but haven't got the laptop with the relevant email & link powered up atm.
No paid staff, all Dev work done by one dedicated individual, all directors & contributors & mods & public liaisons etc are wholly volunteers.
To me, it's a grand resource and a good reason to get out & about, sometimes even by bike, see http://www.geograph.org.uk/geotrips/1299 or http://www.geograph.org.uk/geotrips/1029 for example (if paste & link have worked...) I do try to include some idea of path conditions & rideability in remote areas where poss!
So, being a little curious here…
How do people use it?
I mean, I know what I use it for and how I'd tend to get to the data (at least, how I'd like to: actually doing it seems to involve figuring out which of the half-a-dozen available pages is the least painful to use, feeling sure there was another one somewhere but I can never find it, and then figuring out how… oh, you know). But I expect there are loads of use cases. Any ideas?
Tempted to use the dumps and build a nice front end. Won't ever have time, but still… If a couple of use cases cover most people it might be feasible.
@Bez - the default homepage and the map navigation/front end from that is awful, the page I linked to in my first reply is much better, web 2.0 if you like, being able to zoom in/out and pan around on a map is much more intuitive than trying to guess just where in the country the square you are interested in is.
What would be better is being able to either load a GPX file into the system so you can follow it and see if there's anything interesting along its route or there being an API that you could use to overlay images in an app/website of your choice.
the page I linked to in my first reply is much better
Yeah, seen it before, but one of the issues with it is that I've never worked out how to find it from the site. Instead I have to try to remember where someone posted a link on a forum 🙂 Or I could bookmark it, obviously, but that doesn't suit me because reasons. And even when you get to it, I find it's still quite clunky to use, TBH.
load a GPX file into the system so you can follow it and see if there’s anything interesting along its route
Thanks. And/or maybe an "enter a RideWithGPS (or whatever) route number" feature to do similar.
How on earth have I never stumbled across this site before? Flipping ace. Just needs to be combined with RidgeWithGPS and would be sorted.
Bez, the real question is, who is your hosting provider and what package are you on?
From the main homepage, select "Browser" from the list on the left of the screen. On the page that loads there's a set of links in the text at the bottom of the screen, click "On a map"
Apart from the clunkyness of the main navigation the frustrating thing is that most contributors are more interested in rusting farm machinery than the state of the path/track.
Apart from the clunkyness of the main navigation the frustrating thing is that most contributors are more interested in rusting farm machinery than the state of the path/track.
Yeah. So maybe some sort of upvote/downvote for trail scoping usefulness…
I use Geograph occasionally so will stick some pennies in the bucket.
Agree about the site interface being a bit clunky. Thanks for the links whitestone and bigjim, I had no idea there were other ways of browsing!
This website is new to me. Thanks for the PSA! 🙂
Bez. I search for a location or grid square then use the little map that shows where a pic is taken from to navigate around the area I want to look at using the "move North ( or whatever direction I want) buttons
OOHH - Ta for the links - thats stuff I didn't know it did