Wellington views

Okay, lots of updates lately. Here's a summary:

• Added three new traffic cameras: Petone Overbridge, Tinakori Offramp, and Paremata Roundabout.
• Made a bunch of code changes to speed the site up, its a HUGE result, the site has never worked so well.
• Created the very cool panorama which you see on the homepage between 6am and 9pm. Also available in the Scenery tab.
• Added the Tweet updates for traffic conditions. Just send a tweet to "wgtntraffic" and it will appear on the live updates for all to see.

Cheers
Mike

Blimey! Its been almost a year, nope over a year in fact, since I last updated things here! Its a good thing the system just goes and gets the camera images without needing me to press any buttons or this would never work.

Anyway, I'm pleased to say we have added six new cameras. Five more taffic cams showing SH2 from Petone to Lower Hutt, and one new scenery cam showing Makara Peak.

Thanks to all of you for sending in these new cameras!

Cheers
Mike

Well its been a while since I did any updates. I'm pleased to say that I've added four new cameras thanks to the great folks over at Transit New Zealand who have started to publish some of their traffic monitoring cameras. Check out the new cameras of the Ngauranga Gorge.

Our main camera, the only one actually hosted by us has been dead for about 3 months. Having purchased new power supplies for it I figured it would be easy to fix, but unfortunately not. Looks like I'll have to rerun some cables. I'll wait for a fine day I think.

Cheers
Mike

Firstly, happy new year and a merry Christmas to you all! Secondly, here's some news about what's been happening on the site. Trevor McGavin has fixed his south-east camera so now we have a good weather view of the eastern Hutt hills, thanks Trevor, keep up the good work. The Wellington Airport cameras are offline for a while due to renovations at the home where they live.

I've discovered that Google Ads are a great way to make a few dollars to help cover some of the costs of running the site. Not a lot of money but enough to justify sacrificing some screen space to have them, so please click on a few occasionally, it will mean nothing to you but a few cents to me.

I'm working on the next phase of the site, which will hopefully have live traffic reports on the traffic pages (I just need to find some reliable sources of traffic news), and a few other improvements. One of the things I'd like to add is a personalisable home page for you, so that you can select your favourite four cameras and they will show in a 2x2 grid on your page, to save you having to navigate around multiple pages and cameras, makes it quicker for you and less traffic for me.

Cheers
Mike

I've purchased a new lens for the Wellington Views camera which gives a much better perspective of the city. Its not so distorted/wide angle so it gives a slightly closer view of the city. Anyway, I think it is better, which for $140 I hope it would be. Check it out here.

Cheers
Mike

I've added two new cameras in the Marine section, Lyall Bay surf and Titahi Bay surf. Both thanks to www.surf.co.nz. I've also added a Google map of the camera locations, have a look here.

Cheers
Mike

I've uploaded all the old archives for the currently active cameras, dating back to 2001. This means there are now almost 250,000 archived images of Wellington to view. Okay so most of them involve clouds and rain, and will be dead boring, but hey, if you really want to know what the weather was like on the 2nd of March 2002, you can now find out.

Cheers
Mike

Yeah baby! The archives are up and working. You can click on the timeline thumbnails to go to the quick archive links, or click newer/older to get the next image, or select a specific date and time from the form on the left menu when viewing a camera.

Its soooo good.

Cheers
Mike

Yikes it got late. I've changed the categories side menu into a statistics table showing how many archives we have stored of the cameras. Keep in mind that what it is showing you now is simply 2 months worth, we actually have about four years of archives waiting to be reloaded onto the server! That's kinda a lot of disk space... so I'll get to that soon.

In the meantime I have made good progress on the new archive code, so they should be working very soon. Need sleep now.

Cheers
Mike

Hey, I'd just like to say a huge thanks to those of you that have provided feedback on the new site. Your comments help keep me going and help to improve the site.

John D - You have John to thank for the cool new weather reports on the camera pages. It was his feedback that prompted me to reinstate the weather forecast and to make it much better than we had before. Cheers John!

Magnus E - The categories pages are now as per your suggestion, they will get better again, but thanks for reminding me that they needed some work. Cheers!

Nick W - Wow! Thanks for the great comments, its people like you that make this all worthwhile!

Progress Update:
Tell me you love the new thumbnails of the past five shots (1 hour to 1 week ago). That is something I've been wanting to implement for ages. I like it.

Archives are almost here, I wrote a huge amount of very ulgy code to produce the thumbnails which also applies to archives, but I have now decided to rewrite it all to make archives much easier. So hang in there, just another few days and archives will be back on line.

Enjoy,
Mike

Added the weather information to the camera pages, fixed a few problems with the last update time of the cameras, added another camera, other minor stuff.

Next big challenge is getting the archives working. But its Friday night and I'm off to get drunk so that will have to wait.

Enjoy,
Mike