nycsubway.org: About the Site FAQ

It's easier to describe what ISN'T the purpose of the site, and that is to attempt to duplicate what I would consider "official" information about a transit system. That is to say, up to the minute, accurate info about: fares, schedules, service outages, etc. I expect people to find that sort of thing on official web sites of transit agencies. For New York City Transit, that official web site is www.mta.info.

The site is maintained and managed by David Pirmann. You can use the feedback form to contact me. No, it's not my full time job. I don't even work, in any capacity, for a transit agency. Nor am I even a professional researcher, historian, teacher, or webmaster. (Although I am a professional Unix system administrator.)

The first pages went up around August 1995. You can get an approximate history of site growth on the What's New page. The first sections were photo essays about a New York Transit Museum tour of City Hall Station and a ride on their BMT D-Type "Nostalgia Train". These photo essays were inspired by seeing some other rail-related travelogues and photos on the then-infant World Wide Web.

It costs me $2600/year for two servers leased from a hosting facility. Q: Who sponsors the site?

The site is funded privately by the webmaster with voluntary contributions by individuals, using the Amazon "Honor System" for managing the contributions. In addition, items in the book and video bibliography are linked to Amazon, and if you purchase something by clicking thru from this site, Amazon contributes a small percentage back to us. Recently the site joined the Google AdSense program and there are small contextually-related text ads on some of the page footers.

Other than by counting page views, there is no tracking of a visitor through the site. The site does not use cookies or other methods to plot the path a visitor takes or what pages s/he looks at. I don't do anything with the statistics gathered from the page view counts, and they rarely tell me anything I don't already know about which areas are popular.

Prior to July 2001, the site ran on a variety of hand-me-down Sun hardware, including a Sparc 1+, a Sparc IPX, and a Sparc 20. From July 2001 to April 2002, the site ran on two servers, a Dell Poweredge 350 running RedHat Linux, and a dual processor Sun Sparcstation 20, running Solaris 8. In April 2002, the Dell server crashed and was replaced with a dual processor Sun Ultra 2. Both servers are running Apache 1.3.x, mod_perl 1.21, perl 5.6.0+various modules. In May 2002 the database was converted from mSQL 2.x to MySQL 3.23.x. The site is now located on a dedicated pair of Athlon 2200 machines running Linux. The software remains the same but now the servers are leased from a hosting facility.

All of the "development" is done at home on a Linux workstation configured with the same software as the "production" site. When I'm finished making changes I distribute the new stuff up to the servers. Tools that I like to use to support the site are: xv, ImageMagick, gimp, and xpaint (for image manipulation), apache, perl, and mod_perl (web server and scripting language), and MySQL (database).

I want to continue expanding its coverage of other cities and occasional score some historical material to expand the NYC subway pages. This latter part is hard without library legwork that few people are willing to do as a Volunteer Contributor.

There will be continued expansion of coverage in cities around the U.S. and the world, particularly Europe, as new volunteers are found to contribute material.

There is a long list of major contributors without whom the site would not be nearly as interesting! There are over 600 photographers represented on the site. The top 20 photographers.

To submit photos follow these simple guidelines: (1) Use the Feedback Form to initiate contact with the webmaster. (2) Photos should be in JPG format, in the size range of 640x480 to 1024x768 (anything larger will be scaled down before posting). (3) The image file names are not important, but you should prepare a listing matching the image filename to its important data, such as location, date, car type and number, etc. so that the captions can be prepared. (4) After hearing back from the webmaster, email the photos as single attachments or a zip file. (If you've contributed before you can skip the feedback form and go right to the emailing.)

For cities that are not represented on the site, contributed photos may be held aside until some introductory or explanatory text describing the transit in that city can be prepared. If you'd like to work on that, to go along with your photos, use the Feedback Form to talk to the webmaster about it.

Several!

Lots of nostaligic responses from current and ex-New Yorkers who appreciate being reminded of a part of their home town.

Several times a week I get requests from journalists, students, and other individiuals asking what I consider "research questions", which I just have to return a message of "sorry I'm not a professional historian or researcher; no I don't have access to MTA documents (blueprints, personnel records, etc); no I can't help you with your homework assignment". Questions like these are better posted to a web forum like SubChat (a sister site not managed by nycsubway.org).

DISCLAIMER: www.nycsubway.org is not sponsored by, approved by, or affiliated with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York City Transit or any other transit agency. None of the pages contained on the www.nycsubway.org site are provided by transit agencies and are not to be considered official, unless specifically indicated. The use of the name www.nycsubway.org is not meant to cause confusion in this regard. The official New York City Transit web page is at http://www.mta.info/.

Entire original contents Copyright © 1995-2004 New York City Subway Resources. Contributed items are copyright © their respective creators. No part of this work may be copied or republished in electronic or printed form without prior approval of the respective copyright holder. Send feedback using the Feedback Form for details.