It’s been a couple of months since the last blog post and quite a long time since the site’s been updated. Several people have emailed me to ask what’s going on, and this blog post will explan everything.

This year has not been an easy year for me on a personal level. I’ve had several massive changes, including starting a new career in January and the sudden death of my father in June. On top of this, I’ve been extremely busy with my day-job and the last thing I want to do some days is come home and spend another three hours writing code! I pump a great deal of energy and passion in to my job, which is paying off, but I don’t want to burn out.

I made the unconscious decision to work on some other things for a while, setting aside working on the beta site and working on other things. About a month ago, I returned to working on the site, reviewing the code I’ve written over the past three years, and came to the conclusion that I need to make the site better by replacing it, rather than continually painting and extending it. I’m doing that job right now – which takes time, but I am in no rush.

There are also several other problems I’m tackling – one of which being exactly how far you can go with the Network Rail Data Feeds. The fact of the matter is that it’s impossible to predict much of the future from these data feeds, because there’s a lot of other data which isn’t public. Unfortunately, that situation is very unlikely to change – I’ve been trying quite vocally for the past few years, and I know far too much about all the issues at play.

In summary, I’m still very much behind the site and Open Data in general. I want OpenTrainTimes to continue to be free and useful, but to go to the next level, I need to take some time to rebuild the foundations.