Time travels fast all the times you wish it would be slow eh? Sid Meier’s Railroads itself is over a decade old but this site is still going strong. I am happy that SmrSimple has lasted so long. From the start my goal was to establish a website which would outlast the player base. Happy railroading!
One of my inspirations for smrsimple was Cafe Tropico. Tropico cafe was a fansite for PopTop’s Tropcio. They had forums, map downloads, and a strong community.This is exactly what smrsimple has become, and I am proud of that.
In 1 month smrsimple will turn 3 years old. In 7 months Sid Meier’s Railroads itself will turn 6 years old.
The amazing part of this is that smrsimple is going just as strong as ever. We get between 250 and 350 visitors a day and most visitors are return visitors. People want to play sid meier’s railroads maps and smrsimple is providing that. I say this because there is a temptation to see the none-changing smrsimple frontpage and think that the site is dying.
From creation smrsimple was to become a library of maps with a focus on distributing those maps. It is my belief that smrsimple can be the most utility to map makers and sid meiers railroads players by making map downloading barrier free.
For 3 years smrsimple has provided sid meier’s railroads maps, and we will continue through the next 5 years and beyond.
If you’ve been following the forum you may have noticed my attempts at stopping spam. I have added a “trick” to the registration form that should and has stopped most spam bots from registering. I am also requiring admin approval of each user’s first post. With these two measures in place no spam has reached public viewing for a few days now. Does anyone have a Victory banner handy?
If you are a new user on the forum don’t worry if your post doesn’t show up, it is simply being held in moderation until I get a chance to look at it. Once I’ve approved it you can continue posting like any other member.
On a sadder, yet unrelated note I woke up this morning to see that winter has started, my window will now look like this for the next six months.
It turns out that there was a bug in the HTML for the Shanghai map that left a div open when it should have been closed. Firefox compensated for this and the website looked fine. Since I normally do not visit the site in chrome, and I never open IE, I totally missed the bug. Said browsers though decided not to pretend that everything was ok and caused the sidebar to fly to the bottom of the page.
I have since fixed the bug. Kudos to Google Chrome team for including a Developer tool similar to Firebug, it saved me a lot of time. I should note that this is not a browser bug.
So what do you guys think of it?
For those interested it features the font “Railway” produced by the awesome league of movable type.