Introduction
I have approached a number of people to write articles, but if readers would
like to contribute an article please contact me. The only two stipulations I
make are that the article has to be hill related and that I don't end up in
court through its publication! Otherwise the choice of subject matter is down
to the Guest Contributor.
Guest Contributor – Phil Newby
Phil Newby - Website host of Haroldstreet, one of the leading and innovative websites for hill baggers |
I started www.haroldstreet.org.uk in
January 2001 as a personal project to learn to build a website. I focused it around my Christmas present for
that year which was a basic GPS unit (intended to help me improve my navigation
skills), and my ongoing interest in hill bagging and mountain walking in
general.
At first, the site was very basic and
little more than a collection of GPS files to download. These included
GPS waypoint files for Munros and Wainwrights, and GPS routes of walks that I
had recorded while out in the field. There was also a bit of a photo blog
relating to my walking trips in Scotland & the Alps, wild flowers, and my
passing thoughts on various bits of walking gear. These still continue as
an aside to the main site.
Towards the end of 2002 I was
approached by John Davis to host a file of GPS waypoints for the OS
Triangulation Pillars he was compiling. This same file went on to become
a starting point for Teasel's wonderful trigpointing-UK website.
Over the years, I continued to add more
and more lists of various hills from a wide range of web-based sources.
However, the effort of keeping these lists up to date, and cross
referenced for accuracy & consistency became massively onerous. The
work increased exponentially in complexity with every new list added.
Eventually, I discovered the brilliant hills database maintained by Chris
Crocker and team, and with their permission discarded all my own separate lists
in favour of their far superior efforts and capacity for constantly improving
the accuracy of the data.
Once I had reconfigured my site to use
the Database of British & Irish Hills dataset to generate the GPS waypoint
files dynamically, I converted the Trig-point data from John to work as part of
my website's underlining database too. I then connected many of the trig points
to their nearest hill. It was a bit of a revelation to discover that most
trig points were not on recognised hills at all, and that many of those that
were, were some distance from the true summit. In the end, I settled on
an arbitrary proximity of 200m for lumping a trig point and a hill summit as
being the same "bagging entity".
Haroldstreet home page with choices ranging from on-line tick lists to shared GPX files |
The use of a database behind the
website also opened up the possibility of adding Google mapping to all the
pages. This was a significant steep learning curve for my infantile
website skills but also a very enjoyable challenge. After this, I soon
realised I could also use these hill lists as simple tick-lists to track my own
hill bagging progress, and with just a bit more work it was easy to extend this
functionality for any of the visitors to my site through a simple membership
scheme.
Membership also provided opportunities
for other people to share their GPS walking routes and waypoints with the
virtual world, as well as record comments and photos against the hills, routes
and trig points on the site. This has made the site content much broader
and more interesting than I could ever have achieved on my own.
A major coup for the website was when
Phil Brady asked me to host his famous Ordnance Survey Frequently Asked
Questions pages and his amazing OSGB Excel conversion spreadsheets.
These Excel routines convert latitude and longitude to and from OS
references, compute bearings and ranges, compute variations from north, import
and export GPX files, show data on Google Earth and convert postcodes.
These pages are held at www.haroldstreet.org.uk/osgb/.
More recently the site has again
benefited from collaborations with Rob Woodall, Nick Wakelam and Bernie Hughes
in adding some more hill lists. www.haroldstreet.org.uk hosted the Tumps (P30s) and the Synges earlier than
the Database of British & Irish Hills, and more recently has added the
Yeamens and Dewey Notables. We are now looking at working on a new collaboration
around the Lakes Minor Prominences (LaMPs) for the New Year.
I'm also always open to adding a new
hill list if anyone is motivated enough to do the
work of getting me the data in a format that is similar to that used by the Database of British & Irish Hills and ideally cross-referenced
to their existing hills.
www.haroldstreet.org.uk statistics
for the year 2013:
·
more than 51,000 unique visitors/per
annum
·
more than 347,000 pages viewed/per
annum
·
more than 11,500 GPS Files
downloaded/per annum
·
more than 2000 members have registered
(and successfully logged in)
·
more than 138,000 members' hill &
trig point bagging ticks are recorded
·
more than 770 walking routes have been
submitted by our members
The site will always remain a not for
profit venture and relies on a small but consistent stream of donations, and
some modest advertising revenue to pay for its ongoing internet hosting costs.
The site has benefited massively from
every collaboration with the site users in its continuing evolution; whether
this has been a member's feedback on a minor issue, a comment on a missing trig
point, submission of each GPS route, or help compiling of an entire new list of
hills for the site. So my thanks go to
every contributor and donor who has helped me make www.haroldstreet.org.uk what
it is today.
The Welsh Marilyns page on Haroldstreet |
When asked why he used Haroldstreet,
Rob Woodall said "Haroldstreet has become a key
hill bagging tool for me over the last year or so. I had been vaguely aware of
it for years, but when a friend started using Haroldstreet as her
primary trig bagging resource, I quickly discovered its merits - in
my case mainly as a practical tool for use in parallel to the much more
detailed and labour-intensive hill-bagging and TrigpointingUK sites.
The first thing that struck me was how
easy it is to tick things off, using either the list interface (for lists
already completed) or the map interface for ongoing projects. I had all my
several thousand logs ticked off within 2 or 3 evenings! The speed is largely
because there is no date logging facility (users wanting to record their visit
dates will need a parallel system for this).Then the ability of the main map
page to zoom in to 1:25,000 OS mapping is a boon for planning purposes, as is
the ability to switch to aerial photography to verify that the forest rides
really are where the OS say they are, before doing battle with the sitka
spruce! This is extended by easy linking to other related sites for even more
detail, such as Geograph.org.uk for
1:10,000 mapping and photos. Another powerful feature is the SQL functionality.
Many websites tend to do their data querying in the background.
On Haroldstreet it is possible for a non-programmer like me to
intuitively customise the URL to view / filter hills e.g. by height band and /
or re-ascent, or to combine or contrast lists.
Another plus for me is that Phil as site
owner is always open to new ideas and lists. It's fun and quite a privilege to
be able to contribute to what is an excellent and
very usable website."
I totally agree with Rob's comments. This is a very useful user friendly site which helps you plan and then record your trig and hill-bagging.
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