The NERAIL Railroad Photography Archive
naphotos.nerail.org

The NERAIL Photo Archive is a site that was created to allow railroad enthusiast to share their photographs with one another. The site has become tremendously popular, and currently hosts over 100,000 railroad photographs, all contributed by the site's visitors. Jeff has maintained and improved upon the site for over 10 years.

Technology: The site was built using MySQL as a back-end, Perl to generate the dynamic content, and Perl DBD/DBI to interface to the underlying database. MS Access and ODBC are also used by the site administrator to directly edit the database when necessary.

The dynamic nature of the site allows users to view the photos in many different ways - by order of appearance, by favorite railroad, by location, by photographer, by keyword search, etc.

There are actually three front-ends to the site: naphotos.nerail.org, photos.nerail.org, and transit.nerail.org, providing a customized experience for fans of all North American railroads, New England area railroads, and transit (streetcar and subway) operations, respectively. This approach has allowed for three completely different web sites, each with its own distinct look and feel, supporting three diverse sets of users, while only requiring one underlying database and infrastructure to maintain, and eliminating the need to duplicate data between the three sites.