About The Site
Why I Created Steam Scenes
I created Steam Scenes because I wanted to display some of the photographs my family and me had taken to a wider audience. I created a small site a few years ago that contained about 50 images, and was surprised how successful it was. It was off the back of this that I decided to create bigger and better site that became Steam Scenes.
I do feel there is a lack of good steam engine web sites, there are some (see my Links Page for more) but generally the are just not that many good site out there. I am involved with some other hobbies that are much better represented on the internet, and feel that this lack of internet presence is detrimental to the UK traction engine movement as a whole. The movement is sometimes criticized for not encouraging the younger enthusiast, and hopefully mixing steam engines and the internet will show that the hobby is not stuck somewhere in the last century.
The concept and the name of the site is loosely based on the series of books, "The Steam Scene" published by Dick Blenkinsop in the mid 70's. I loved these books as a child and read them from cover to cover many times, and still do in fact. I wanted to recreated the format of the books: High quality photographs, a short, interesting paragraph of text and details of the engine.
The Pages
Steam Scenes has been totally coded by hand, I feel this creates better, cleaner code and ensures the site can be read by all browsers. The text editor of choice was TextPad 4.4. I cannot recommend this product highly enough, I suggest you download a trial now and purchase a copy ASAP. Some of the more complex tables were created with Microsoft FrontPage, just to make my life easier, it also has an excellent code tidying facility which I use extensively.
All graphics were produced with Macromedia Fireworks 3, which I consider to be the best web graphics program available.
The site will work in all browsers, no client side scripting or anything like that yet, I did however design it in IE 5.5 on Microsoft Windows 2000 so it is going to look best when viewed in that, generally anything that supports stylesheets is best. The site can be viewed in all screen resolutions, but 800x600 should be considered a minimum, if you are using 640x480 it's going to look pretty rough. I designed it 1280x1024, so the bigger the better really.
The table below provides a glance at guide:
| Operating System: |
Microsoft Windows 2000 |
| Browser: |
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 |
| Screen Resolution: |
1280x1024 |
| Colour Depth: |
True Colour (32 Bit) |
I have tried to use stylesheets where for page styling where ever I can, this increases your choice as a user. For instance if you find the text on the page too small (or too big) you can change the text size by altering the text-size option under the View menu. If you are really flash you could create your own stylesheet for these pages, I would be interested to know the result.
The pages are coded in HTML 4 at the moment, but I am going to upgrade them to XHTML in due course. I have checked the page code and stylesheet with the W3c and they have been verified, see buttons below.
Currently, the only non-static element to the site, is the web counter at the bottom of the home page. This was started, at 0, on the 3rd September 2001. This is really a very crude way of collecting statistics and is there just to give me and idea of what does and does not create hits.
The Pictures
There are 2 kinds of picture on the site, those taken with film and scanned and ones taken with a digital camera. I have not labelled each picture specifically but you can generally tell by examining the size and quality: click here for an example of a digital image and click here for an example of a film/scanned image.
In the past most of our images have been traditional film, but our results with the digital camera have been so good I see more and more being digital in the future.
Page Storage
Steam Scenes pages are currently stored on various free ISP accounts, primarily BT Internet. I am aware this is a highly unsatisfactory situation and I am looking to move to something more permanent in the future. If you have any suggestions for good web storage companies I would like to hear from you.
The pages are uploaded using a mixture of FTP Explorer and the FTP part of Internet Explorer, I prefer the latter.
Hits
From past experience I seem to get the majority of my hits from search engines, primarily Google. Targeted links on message boards have also been successful, and I am hoping that some people will link to me and provide me with additional traffic. I am hoping over time that I will build up a base of users who will return to the site on a regular basis, just to see what has been added.
The Traction Engine Site Ring
Steam Scenes is a member of the Traction Engine Site Ring.
We were asked to join the site ring by its founder and good friend of ours Sharpo. The site ring aims to list some of the better Traction Engine web sites, publicize them and hopefully give us all a few more hits!
Copyright and Using the Images
Click here for the separate page I have created concerning copyright on the site.
Plans for the Future
My plans for the future are first and foremost continue uploading high quality pictures on to the site. I attend events throughout the season and it is my aim to add these images as I take them. We also have many thousands of other images, taken over the last 20+ years which can be added to the site, I am going to look at doing a few special features during the off season.
The limiting factor at the moment is the amount of space I have to store these images online, I am looking to secure 1Gb+ of storage soon, so that I can add as many pictures as I want.
Other technical plans include moving beyond the static HTML nature of the current site and using server-side scripting. I also want to add engine details to a database, and retrive them that way.
Remember, keep checking back for updates to the site.
Created: 11th September 2001
Updated: 16th September 2001
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