Possible Directions
This site has been around with its present focus since 1998. In recent years, as my career has required more of my time, and as my interests have begun shifting in other directions, updates have become much more infrequent. This fact has me contemplating the future of this site and, in particular, the "roadfan" or "roadgeek" parts of the site.
When this site was originally developed, the only way to share photos and information was to create one's own website and to participate in Usenet newsgroups. The requirements for doing so were, at the time, pretty simple, particularly for those of us with a background in technology. Those of us interested in roads and highways set up our own sites to share photos. At one time, nearly every state had a "volunteer" site devoted to roads and highways. That's dwindled in recent years. Of course, state departments of transportation have had their own sites, too, rich in information.
Over 19 years, there have been huge shifts in online interaction, especially with the rise of social media. Sharing now happens on various platforms, including, but not limited to, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even blogs (though those do seem to be declining now).
For the "roadgeek" or "roadfan" community, the primary forms of interaction seem to be a multiplicity of Facebook groups plus some online forums using older technology. Ten years ago, if you wanted to discuss roads, there was one place to go: misc.transport.road in Usenet newsgroups. If you wanted to share photos, you still had to build your own website, though I think Flickr and other photo-sharing sites were around by then, too.
In any event, the situation is now both more fragmented and more unified. It seems that Facebook is the place to be for roadgeeks/roadfans. Within the platform, though, discussion is fragmented. In some cases, the fragmentation is along regional lines; in others, it's about specific topic areas such as sign goofs.
The platforms are easy to use and encourage photo and video sharing. They're bad for archiving or finding things. No doubt, all those photos are stored somewhere in Facebook's computing clouds, but the tools for finding them are not bequeathed to ordinary mortals. So: great sharing capabilities; no indexing whatsoever and minimal searching at best.
I don't know of much, if any roadgeek/roadfan activity on Tumblr, Instagram, etc. I experimented with Tumblr at one time, part of the blogging that I did for a while at the now-defunct Posterous (thank you, Twitter, for destroying a terrific blogging platform - and for what? - you still can't turn a profit!) Forums are still around but hold little interest for me.
From the beginning, I've maintained an open invitation to contribute and share photos. I've had no contact for at least a couple of years in that regard. Some of that's on me: there's little enticement for anyone to share with a website that isn't being updated very often. With social media platforms, the gratification is instant, even if a lot of the other capabilities of those platforms represent a step back from what this site offers.
There are other reasons updates have been infrequent in the past couple of years. I mentioned my career: I moved up into executive leadership for a while and then stepped back to a front-line role a couple of years ago for a variety of reasons I'll share with people who contact me directly. Most of you won't be interested. My field of work is "hot" and there's a lot of work to do with not enough people to do it.
But there's more. The manually-coded origins of this site, a necessity in 1998, have not gone away at all. The whole thing is still handcrafted. It means that updates take time, even with some tools to quicken the process. One key tool, the Perl programming language, has also undergone some changes which have broken some of the programs that I have used to facilitate updates. I've had to come up with workarounds.
Then there's my own level of interest. I am, by nature, a very independent person. Even in the days of misc.transport.road, there was a lot of chatter about roadgeek meets and so on. I have been to a couple of meets. They were pleasant enough but, ultimately, I'll have to say that roads are far from my only interest and I found that much of the discussion and activities at meets lost my interest and attention after a while. I have other social outlets that I find more satisfying. I've also spent a lot of time in recent years on fitness, particularly road cycling.
There's nothing wrong with meets for those who like them; they just don't fit me all that well.
Technology has also moved on. The last substantial update in the site's technology was 10 years ago. Modern web programming techniques are almost entirely absent. The site no longer helps keep me up to date with web technologies. The search engine is clever and fast but the interface is outdated. Probably anyone under the age of 40 finds it clumsy. Fixing it requires effort that I'm not prepared to make right now.
Where am I going with this essay? I am thinking about reducing the scope of this site, or possibly shutting it down altogether. The domain name is good through 2019, so I have some time to work through the various considerations. Options I'm considering may include:
- Eliminating the Missouri Route Log. I haven't updated it in a few years.
- Eliminating the Missouri section of the site. I don't visit there much any more, and I'm appalled at the hard-right tilt of the state's politics.
- Eliminating all road-sign photo sections except for California and maybe the US highways section. For the latter, I would have to migrate some photos from parts of the site that would be eliminated.
- Doing away altogether with the roads sections of the site and just retaining the miscellaneous items.
- Closing down the entire site.
If you've made it this far, you really should get a prize, but I don't have any to give. I can offer you my interest in hearing what you might have to say about these options. Please send me your thoughts and suggestions to the address that's on my Contact Information page. I'm sorry to make you click to another page, but I had to do this to keep volumes of spam manageable.
I have no fixed deadline for making any decisions, but I think I would like to come up with some plans for the site by the end of 2017 or the first quarter of 2018.
Thanks for reading, and for your interest over all these years.
Mark RobertsOakland, California
E-mail: Please see the Contact Information page.