Blog
Transit City gets on the rails
Saturday 17 March 2007
As reported by pretty much everybody, the city has finally launched a plan for the future of light rail transit in Toronto. About time, too. They’ve even set up a web site (TransitCity.ca) with various maps and documents. More coverage from the Globe and Mail, Star, and Spacing Wire.
About time too, says Steve Munro, one of the activists who fought to keep the streetcar network here back in the early ‘70s. Lots more analysis of the proposal on his blog.
It’s not a done deal by any stretch of the imagination, and there are some important questions still to answer. But it’s a crucial step, because it puts a city-endorsed plan on the table for discussion. And a network of fast, reliable surface transit, though less sexy than a subway extension to Vaughan, serves many more people per dollar spent. (If only federal funding was based on such practical criteria!)
There’s a growing sense that things are finally happening at the TTC. I don’t know how much of it can be credited to new commission chair Adam Giambrone, but there’s something symbolic about his presence, a youthful energy that’s refreshing after years of Howard Moscoe’s bluster.
The TTC has a reputation for shutting out the public, even those who should be their strongest allies. They forced the creator of an amusing anagrammed subway map to stop using the look-and-feel of their own official maps (though I note he’s put it back up in its original form now). They treated the TTC Rider Efficiency Guide with glaring suspicion. They completely ignored the popular subway station buttons sold by Spacing Magazine. (What on earth is that stupid little shop in Union station for then?)
But these days it seems they’re opening up. Giambrone and a handful of real live high-up TTC staff came to TransitCamp, a day-long ad-hoc ideas conference held by local webheads and transit activists… and by all accounts they actually listened. And if the Transit City buttons seem suspiciously familiar, it’s because Giambrone’s people commissioned Spacing dude Matt Blackett to design them.
Exciting times - but as always the proof will be in the funding. Fingers crossed. And let’s let the Feds know we want One Cent Now.
Yeah. So about that web site. It’s in Joomla, an open-source content management system - you can tell, too, by the bits of default template still hanging around. In my experience, you can coax the thing into looking tidy, but it involves a lot of banging away at templates and CSS, and the thing always seems to run slow and clunky. I used to run the Flickershow site on Joomla, but finally I couldn’t stand it any more and switched to Expression Engine, which I like much, much better. (I’m thinking of migrating this site to it, too, but with dozens and dozens of entries and comments, it’ll be a while!)
Comments
At work I’ve been trying out lots of different CMS/blogging systems, looking for one that’s easy to set up and will work for as many different projects as possible. I’ve totally had it with having to learn a different technology for every single bloody job, (godhelpme if I have to do some work on a really old site of ours). EE’s the best I’ve found for the type of work we’re doing, and I’ve already used it in about five different projects.
Up side: quick to install; allows multiple blogs and multiple users; runs fast; templating system is flexible enough I haven’t even bothered with plugins yet. Templates and custom fields made it incredibly easy to set up an “Upcoming Shows” roll that automatically expires past shows and generates Google Maps URLs if given a well-formatted address. Syndicated feeds and XML can be generated by the same templating system.
Down side: still getting used to the quirks of its URL-to-template mapping; configuration sometimes requires a lot of head-scratching and poking through layers of menus. Uhh… that’s it so far. The gallery module is extra, however, which I imagine would be a point against for you.
I’m still amazed at what you’ve managed to wring out of Singapore. :D
Posted by Eli McIlveen on 18 March 2007 at 12:04 AM
The static pages in my site are just… static html. Well, mostly static. There’s a snippet of php that generates the site menu. And the front page calls into Singapore to pull the latest and random images. But it’s not like I have a blog integrated into Singapore, or have it holding the ‘about’ page - only pages with the ‘powered by Singapore’ link are actually generated by that.
The Singapore modifications just kinda added up. None were particularly complex - I think the code to support schedulled, future-dated comics was the biggest change, overall. Search was simpler! (and was a sort of inversion of how I’m hiding the future-dated stuff…)
I could probably port it to a more general-purpose cms, and I have a serious look at that every few months, but it’d really be overkill. My site is fundamentally an image gallery with a few other pages. Comics are just a gallery with a schedule, a different template, and a couple of associated static pages; the ‘showcase’ is really just a search, pretending to be a gallery thanks to some mod.rewrite fudging.
one of these days there may be a forum. probably Vanilla, though I kinda don’t want to do that until I can make its javascriptiness switch from huge.tacul.ous to mootools.
Sometimes I think about doing a little cleanup on my version of Singapore and forking. Or just building my own gallery from scratch that makes different compromises than Singapore… but I will probably never do either.
but one of these days I may also end up doing web design stuff, front and back end. I never know.
Posted by Egypt Urnash on 18 March 2007 at 1:43 AM
You know you’re a geek when you can tell which CMS something’s running on long before you get to the “Powered by SomeCMS” bit in the footer.
I’ve never really poked at EE since it’s been entirely pay for most of its life. Hacking Singapore to add my desires has been a lot of fun in its own way, even if it’s getting to the point where my hacks are turning into a complex tapestry of scars…
Posted by Egypt Urnash on 17 March 2007 at 11:49 AM