Transition

A few changes have been made to the website and blog, and because they are rather significant, I thought I would take a few minutes to outline them.  I have mentioned before that everything but this blog was hosted by webs.com, which is fine, but it takes a bit more effort to keep things up to date when we have to visit multiple sites to do it.  Our contract with webs.com expires at the end of this week, and we decided to take that opportunity to move everything to Blogger, which is where the blog has been hosted since the beginning.  As of about eight minutes ago, that transition is complete.  The website, www.ogdenbrotherstrains.com is still there, but will not be after Sunday.  We have created pages with Blogger to replace the ones that will be gone at the end of the week.  They contain the same information, only a bit more updated.  Some, such as our links page, have been expanded.

One of the biggest changes you will notice is the lack of an index, of sorts.  On the old website, most of the pages served as an index to our blog posts.  Actually, the entire website served as little more than that.  Since we attach labels, or keywords, to every one of our posts, there is already a built in index.  All the keywords we have used can be found in the left sidebar, in alphabetical order, starting below the poll and popular posts.  If you want to access a certain topic, simply click on the appropriate keyword over there.  For example, if you want to see some of our past Photos of the Week, find the label "Photo of the Week" and that will take you to the entire list of them.  For the railroading stories I write, click on "Prototype Railroading."  The other benefit to this system is it allows for a much more complex index of our blog.  On the website, our blog was broken down into model railroading and prototype railroading.  Well, if you were looking for all our posts pertaining to the Walthers products, that meant you still had to do a lot of digging.  With the keyword system, simply click on "Walthers" and you will be taken to all the blog posts we have written pertaining to Walthers products.  There was no practical way for us to do that before, because updating the website index had to be done manually for every topic listed there.  Needless to say, that alone could get quite time consuming!  This system will update itself.  When a new post goes up, it will appear under the appropriate keywords instantly.  The only posts that will not show up are administrative posts, such as this one.  We figure people want to look for railroad and model railroad posts more than these boring ones!

We will be adding new features as time permits.  We do want to get a calendar of events up on a separate page, where users could potentially look for upcoming model train shows, excursions, and other special events within the railroad and model railroad communities.  We obviously cannot be aware of every event in the country without help, so if you have an event coming up that you want listed on our calendar, please send us an email with the dates, times, location(s), and any other important information.  We will have more information about that as it develops.

We would also like to make this more than just stories about modelling and railroading, and so we will be adding other resources to the site, in appropriate pages, as time permits.  We want to have information on train watching hot spots, radio channels for your scanners, railroad themed trips and vacations, and other things.  Please let us know if there is something you are specifically interested in seeing on the site, and we will see about adding it.

The only drawback to moving all the information on our website over here was that I could not figure out how to get our signal mast navigation menu to work with the new information and links.  Steven is the real HTML guru, and he is away right now.  He was the one that put that menu together.

On a different note, yesterday I had the opportunity of riding the BNSF Employee Appreciation Special.  Expect a post on that in the next couple of days.  Tomorrow morning, I have orientation for the Engineer Program, so we should have a lot to talk about in the next post!  It'll be more interesting than this, I promise!