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Richard Fairhurst

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Everything posted by Richard Fairhurst

  1. It was indeed a 'treading carefully' situation as Gary suggests, but nothing to do with advertising - in fact, all three magazines' advertising departments will try to turn away ads from any company where they have reasonable evidence that there are problems. Rather, I believe that the decision not to publish was because Tony Walker hadn't formally been declared bankrupt, so there could have been libel issues. (It was slightly before my 'watch' began, so I may have the wrong understanding here.) December will be my first issue as editor and I will probably take a different view on such things. Meanwhile, if anyone hears of Tony Walker starting up again under a different name, do let me know. Richard
  2. Really glad you like them - that was what I spent a good part of the first half of this year doing! I gave a presentation on them at the Society of Cartographers' Summer School in Cambridge this year, and will be writing the whole experience up for the Society's journal.
  3. Yes, they are finished (in so far as anything on the web is ever finished!). They're zoomable, scrollable, highlight the waterways and have togglable icons. There's an example here (for the Oxford Canal) and you need Flash to see them. I think the Waterscape people might be working on a more rudimentary non-Flash version for the future.
  4. The TNC have a regular column in Canal Boat. A couple of them post regularly to other Internet waterway forums, too.
  5. You are almost certainly right... I'm just telling you their reasoning.
  6. They want to double the number of visitors to the waterways - not the number of boaters. In other words, lots of new sightseers, walkers, cyclists etc.
  7. Thank you all! I've been there a week and am greatly enjoying it (gradually remembering how to use Quark XPress after two years doing web stuff)... my first issue will be the December one, out mid-November.
  8. Sadly I think that sort of money is pretty much par for the course for the public sector. The company providing the hosting has a lot of contracts with local councils, and applies a fairly standard rate to them all...
  9. I'll hold my hands up and say "guilty as charged" on this one. The 2,000 mile figure is BW's - it relates to their network, not anyone else's. It's actually a few years out of date. Since then, we've had the reopening of the Rochdale (intermittently ), HNC, Forth & Clyde and Union, so the BW network alone is substantially larger already. There are, of course, some pretty major waterways outside BW control. The Thames, for one; the Broads, the MSC, the Bridgewater, a couple of Avons, Nene, Great Ouse, Medway, Yorkshire Derwent, Chelmer & Blackwater, Wey, Basingstoke, etc. etc. The non-tidal Thames alone is 135 miles from Inglesham to Teddington. But there are plenty more rivers which are regularly navigated, but we don't generally consider. The Wye downstream of Tintern is certainly one; the Usk, the Tyne, the Wear; there's a lovely article on the IWA website about navigating the Tweed - and so it goes on. The full calculations were in an article I put together for Canal Boat, based on a couple of readers' researches, in around spring/summer 2003 (I forget the exact date, sorry). It's a bit of a "how long is a piece of string?" question, of course, but you can use the raw materials in that article to arrive at your own figure. I arrived at Waterscape shortly afterwards and brought the 4,000 figure with me....
  10. I can answer this one fairly openly because I don't work for Waterscape or BW any more. Earlier this year, when I did work for Waterscape, we threw out the old site and started again from scratch. Lots of reasons, but to summarise, the original site had been developed by a third-party company which knew absolutely nothing about the waterways and (arguably) nowhere near as much as they should about building websites. What's more, it was ridiculously expensive to run - about four times what we thought the going rate should be. Worse still, if we wanted to change anything technical on the site, we had to go back to the original company and pay them to do the work: the contract didn't give us full access to our own servers. And plenty did need changing - like the fact the maps were rubbish and the search didn't work. So Paul (webmaster) and I asked the powers-that-be to swallow their pride, admit they'd been wrong with the first site, and allow us to rebuild it in-house. To their eternal credit, they did - very, very unusual for the public sector, which generally thinks that the only way you do IT is by spending a lot of money with a big company. The new site went live at the start of July. There were two bits missing: the route-planner and the online licensing. For technical reasons, we couldn't just keep the old ones running on the new site (the old server was Microsoft, the new one is Linux), so we had to rewrite them, too. We figured that it would be better to have a month's outage on the licensing, rather than to hold the rest of the site up by a month and pay £10,000 for another month's expensive hosting. The licensing should have been back up by August 10th, and indeed, our bit was done by then. Unfortunately... all the actual issuing of licences is done on a SAP system by a third-party company, LogicaCMG. (You might be starting to see a pattern here.) They were late in doing the work required to get their computers to talk to Waterscape. They're still late. I left Waterscape just over a week ago and they were promising then that they were almost finished. I believe that the licensing should therefore be back on Waterscape fairly shortly. Renewals will be first (which the old system could never do), new licences after that. Incidentally, the SAP system, as implemented by LogicaCMG, is the very same one that caused the enormous backlog of licence applications last year. You might think BW isn't very good at choosing IT companies to work with. I couldn't possibly comment.
  11. This post cannot be displayed because it is in a forum which requires at least 10 posts to view.
  12. Headroom (air draught) could be a problem for you: Leeds & Liverpool and Lancaster canals are quoted as 8ft max, Rochdale is lower still. You'll be ok on the Bridgewater and the River Weaver. There's some info on moorings on Waterscape.com - find the canal you want, click 'Boating' on the left-hand menu, then 'Moorings'. For the latest availability on (BW-owned) towpath moorings, suggest you call the North-West office on 01925 847700. Richard
  13. Above dimensions should be fine... you might scrape the bottom occasionally, but should be ok on the wider waterways. You might want to consider headroom, too (not generally an issue on the sea). Speed limit typically 4mph on the canals, can be more on the rivers. Richard
  14. Why thanks David, I love you too. I think I'll put a big notice next time we do a story like that - "Warning to Canal World readers - this one isn't entirely serious." For what it's worth... last Friday morning, I followed Chris Moyles along the canal for a short while to make sure nothing untoward happened with the attendant paparazzi (it didn't) and to get some shots which we could supply to the local press. BW got some excellent publicity from it, not just the radio show but also follow-up local press coverage on Saturday. After all of that, it seemed a shame not to run a little light-hearted piece on Waterscape. And for the literal-minded, I'm pretty sure BW doesn't actually have powers to issue fixed penalty notices for speeding... Richard editor, Waterscape.com
  15. From my personal understanding: Cyclists and walkers make either a 0% contribution or a 48% contribution, depending how you look at it. In other words, this is the Government grant (£95m in 2003/04), ultimately funded by taxpayers... which includes 25,000 boaters and many, many more walkers and cyclists. (Anglers contributed £449,000 directly to BW's coffers in 2003/04.) As for how much attention each group gets, I'd estimate 70% of the work that goes on in the first floor at Willow Grange (where I work) is dedicated to boats and boating. This might be slightly atypical, but it's pretty widely recognised that, in order to attract visitors on foot or bike, you have to have the boats, the locks, and so on. BW talks a lot about how "navigation is at the core of our business" and working there has shown me that they do mean it. Conversely, though, remember that all those millions of pounds of Lottery funding for the Huddersfield Narrow and the Rochdale weren't intended just for a handful of boaters like you or me. If they were, the resulting storm would make the Royal Opera House stuff look like a little local difficulty. I don't think any waterway has ever been restored by boater power alone, to be honest - you'd be surprised how few WRGies are boaters, for example. All the financials are in the BW annual report on the corporate website for anyone who's really interested! Richard (posting as a boater, not a BW representative)
  16. 7% of total income, to be exact (£14m out of £195m). What it means is that the new Waterscape should - hopefully - be a significant amount better and easier-to-use than the current one; so even if it's not all to your taste (and we're a very wide-ranging site, so I wouldn't expect that), you should find the boating content a whole lot clearer and more useful. Not to mention the new maps... Richard
  17. Wait until our new site goes live at the start of July. Richard
  18. With respect, Bernie, Canal World (and/or uk.rec.waterways, the Yahoo! list, Waterways Interactive, the Ownerships board...) is an excellent place to discuss other sites. Not all sites have their own discussion board (we don't have one at Waterscape, for example). Of those that do, some are edited rather than being free-for-alls - so your post may be chopped, or simply not accepted. And any forum is prone to a chorus of bogus opinions from 'sock puppets' - people who look like real posters, but are actually aliases for other posters or even the webmaster himself. I'm very happy for people to discuss Waterscape.com here or anywhere else. What I would say, though, is that there are now so many discussion forums (five listed above, and doubtless a few more) that you shouldn't necessarily expect any comments to be read by the webmaster or editor! If you want something changed, send an e-mail to the site in question. But Gaggle's posting reads (to me at least) like a bit of news for the rest of us, not a personal message to Tom Crossley. Richard editor, Waterscape.com
  19. You'll know if you've got your subscription copy... it's the one with adverts for WW hoodies with it. Really.
  20. This post cannot be displayed because it is in a forum which requires at least 10 posts to view.
  21. I think the market is "correcting itself" a little at the moment. For the past five to ten years, the majority of inland boats sold have been build-to-order narrowboats with increasingly high specs. It's not realistic for this trajectory to continue ad infinitum. What we're seeing now is largely a return to the old patterns of boat choice. Not everything will be narrowbeam. Production-line models are definitely making a comeback - many people just want to get afloat, without having to pay big bucks and wait for the next build slot. And consequently, there'll be much wider variation in prices. Boat-builders will have to adjust to this, but I think many are doing so. As for increasing mooring supply (which is a big BW priority at the moment), my feeling is that we need to make better use of the waterspace that's already out there. Surely Braunston/Napton isn't the only area with several cruising possibilities and good motorway links. Richard (personal opinions only!)
  22. The Philips Navigator is definitely, definitely what you want. It has canals, locks, and even (in the latest edition) bridge numbers... all on a scale halfway between a standard road atlas and an OS Landranger map. Can't recommend it highly enough. Richard
  23. Hope to have some good news for you about Waterscape maps before too long. Richard
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