You are here : HOME > CONTACT
Contact
About Walking Melbourne
What is Walking Melbourne ?
Walking Melbourne is a database of architecture and architects, past and present from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. For those who don't know much about Melbourne, visit 'the City' page.
Walking Melbourne features dynamic content generated by a web database developed in open technologies (apache, linux, css, mysql, html & php). The database contains images and information on Melbourne buildings and encourages people to contribute to creating a knowledge base of our built environment.
Who started Walking Melbourne ?
My name is Sean Fishlock, and I am the site maintainer and domain owner. The site began in late 2001, 6 months after I moved to Melbourne to live. I studied arts and architecture briefly at the University of Queensland before pursuing a career in Information Technology.
What inspired Walking Melbourne ?
Frustration is a great motivator. The experience of spending hours on the net unable to find anything at all of interest about Melbourne buildings or architects. Walking Melbourne is also fuelled by a keen interest in the potential of web database programming, the website is an endless battle between an expanding website feature set and maintenance of the database (as a result, the integrity of the content is sometimes questionable). That's where you can help.
The name 'Walking Melbourne' came from my endless walking to discover Melbourne's many fantastic hidden secrets.
How does one person get the time to do all this ?
I wish I knew. Thanks though goes to the contributors of the site. Without their support I would have given up on this idea a long time ago. To have this site developed by someone else would have cost a small fortune. On top of this, there is a significant research aspect, and although I have spent many hours digging this info up, I am not an academic. Help has come in many ways, from programming tips, information, hosting, to ideas and encouragement.
Special Thanks
The following people have contributed significantly to the concept of Walking Melbourne (thanks to all for their ongoing support):
Support and Encouragement
Scott Davey, Guy King, John & Geoff Fitzpatrick, Lisa Taffe, Peter Johns, Alastair Taylor, Rohan Storey & The National Trust of Victoria
Thanks also to the many kind words of visitors to the site.
Information Contribution
Rohan Storey, Richard Braddish, Peter Barrett
Open Source Developers
I would also like to duly acknowledge all Open Source packages that have contributed to the development of this site. They have saved me countless programming hours.
PHPBB, PHPMyAdmin
Future Plans
Email me to find out how you can contribute.
The aim is to create a more community focussed site, providing a place to bring together architecture appreciators and historians alike. The site will soon feature a guestbook, discussion forum and articles.
What's New (and what's old) !
Day by day it eats away ...
April 2008
2007
- Rationalisation of site features.
(10/8/05)
- Implemented client side and server side validation and removed the autoresponder to stop the freakin childish hackers bulk spamming the contact form with their scripts and spoofing real return addresses from public databases. I hate this sort of thing, these people are really ruining the Internet as an interactive resource for information, and my patience is getting extremely thin for it. (again, why me ???) all I can say is what goes around comes around, and I hope you too get hacked some day you mindless morons.
(10/6/05)
- Tweaked some stylesheets for a temporary "new look"
(1/6/05)
- Returned the site to new server after a few months offline.
(24/1/05)
- The "I knew I had to do something about it ..." blog
- Fixed the "City" page, which was corrupted by a recent server failure
- Upgraded forum to PHP 2.0.10 (when the hell is 2.2 coming ?)
- Tightened security after several recent hack attempts on the site (why me?)
(20/4/04)
- After a massive hiatus, fixed a bug that I was not aware of causing pagination not to work when searching on architects names
- Added a new Restaurant Review section
(14/7/03)
- Added a new Events Calendar
(20/5/03)
- Been a long break, but finally ensured HTML 1.0 Transitional compliance and optimised pages for search engines, and;
- Upgraded Discussion Forum to PHPBB 2.0.4
(9/12/02)
- Added 'the City' page (finally !) due to the requests of many overseas visitors
(10/11/02)
- Added simple breadcrumb trail navigation
(9/10/02)
- Added a 'What's New' section to display recently added / updated buildings.
- Removed images from certain searches for even quicker results.
- Added a swag of discussion forum enhancements.
(29/9/02)
- Added listing display for National Trust and Victorian Heritage registers
(27/9/02)
- New header and logo !! Thanks goes to Lisa for the logo design - great job :)
(18/9/02)
- Added a script to put page numbers, next & previous to limit search results and speed up loading for 56Kers (still have to complete the aggregate search)
(14/9/02)
(11/9/02)
(05/9/02)
- Added 'Featured Building' section
(04/9/02)
- Added building height details to database / profile (height search coming soon, profile template still needs cleaning up)
(02/9/02)
- More browser fixes :( stupid nav causing problems
- Email building comment now sends email confirmations.
- New Architect Profile (only a handful of architects have them ATM)
(29/8/02)
- Badly needed browser bashing
- Fixed some rendering bugs occuring in earlier browers (IE 4&5, NS 3&4) ... (thanks to all those who pointed them out to me, I was oblivious)
(25/8/02)
- Email building note feature now fully implemented ...
- Listed on MSN, Alta Vista etc.
(24/8/02)
- New colour scheme and stylesheets ! (thanks go to Lisa - stay tuned for a completely new design ...)
- New navigation, pages now load heaps faster ... (thanks goes to Guy)
(23/8/02)
- Fixed Thankyou screen
- Added note contribution feature to Building profiles (not yet fully implemented)
- Listed on the Open Directory
(22/8/02)
- Wrapped nav around all major screens (now much easier to navigate)
- More stylesheet tweaks (looking much better :)
- Removed useless search by year function
(13/8/02)
- Site Search feature ! (thanks goes to Peter Johns)
- Removed a whole lot of broken links .... (thanks again to Peter)
- Added a whole lot of demolished buildings (thanks to Rohan, Richard)
- Stylesheet and graphical tweaks
- Some feedback responses (guestbook coming soon)
- Basic (very) content management system
(8/8/02)
- Added 'Latest News' section (to be updated from now on)
- Over 400 Melbourne buildings and images in the database.
(15/7/02)
- Sample searches
- Added more filters and more searches
- Added an aggregate report tool (which I hope to be graphical in a couple of releases)
- Added Search by Year function (fairly useless at this stage though)
- More database architecture tweaks
(5/7/02)
- Implemented column sorting
- Implemented basic filtering
- Listed on Google ! - finally ...
- Added site Index (thanks Guy) - individual building profiles now spidered
May 2001
- Encouraged to make the site public and promote it (thanks go to Lisa)
- Listed on the new VicNet website.
- 40 landmark buildings listed
- Began listing with search Engines (very few visitors, the occasional accidental tourist)
- Site cut across to new domain
February 2001
- Walkingmelbourne.com registered
September 2000
- Initial flat database built for personal research purposes and bookmarks to architecture websites and hosted on the web
- Hosted on www.seanfishlock.com with ISP Datalink (thanks to Scott)
May 2000
- Moved to Melbourne, Victoria from Brisbane in Queensland.
- Celebrate !
- Check out some cool hidden secrets of this funky city
|
