A few hundred metres climb up from the slushy fields of Great Ayton we were truly in a Narnian world.
Do you hear the snow against the window-panes, Kitty? How nice and soft it sounds! Just as if some one was kissing the window all over outside. I wonder if the snow LOVES the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.”
That quote is, of course, not from C. S. Lewis but from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking-Glass’ and I chose that because Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, died this day in 1898. I thought it appropriate.
Long-standing readers of this photo-diary (I prefer that term rather than ‘blog’) will have noticed that I have recently (to be exact last October, although it seems like an eternity) changed the layout of the little map extract that I usually include at the bottom of postings.
Previously I had been using a facility offered by the Ordnance Survey called ‘OpenSpace’ that enabled users to embed a map onto their own web pages. It was free but required me having to cut and paste about 40 lines of Javascript code from the O.S. website.
The Ordnance Survey have now completely changed their system to something they call the ‘OS Data Hub’. On the plus side, it is easier to use (just one line of code on this WordPress site), and it looks far prettier. At least I think so.
But on the downside, there could be a cost involved and all the map extracts on my past postings (i.e. prior to 15 October 2020 see here for the last post) will not work. You will just see a little error symbol. The O.S. are proposing to pull the plug on the old server in August this year.
Now I don’t intend to go back through every posting from the year dot and edit to include the new mapping. But if you would like me to update a particular post just drop me a message.
As for the cost, this was something I was worried about. I make no money from this photo-diary (in fact I have to pay for the domain name and web hosting). The OS Data Hub is clearly aimed at commercial and public sector users. After several emails to the O.S. (although I am sure I was not the only one), they have offered the first £1,000 worth of views per month for free.
This sounds like big money but I was still worried. I’ve now checked my usage. Over the past month, the site generated 374 views which amounted to just 5p of my ‘free’ monthly allowance of £1,000. So unless the site goes viral I can continue without fear of bankruptcy.
But deep down, I worry that this is a just microcosm of all our modern technology. Just how durable is it? Will the ‘OS Data Hub’ become redundant in a few years’ time. The O.S. say not, but as we have seen, technologies come and go. Like Windows 98.
The new mapping is quite good. I can add multiple pins each with a different colour to my heart’s content. I can also add routes with a height profile. This is from this morning’s bimble.
I don’t intend to use this facility much but it might come in useful occasionally.
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