Record and diary

of the Plane trees of London website.

29 August 2207

Added a bit more detail and a new pic to the Suttneri article.

Incorporated the search functions into the Links page.

25 August 2207

Added the search page, using Google custom search.

20 June 2007

Added some specimens of the Hackney Form to the specimens page.

Replaced all text pages on the old website with redirects to corresponding pages here.

Put up robots.txt and sitemap.xml pages.

16 June 2007

Added some new trees to the unknown forms (variants) list; Brookmill Park, Richmond, Highbury Fields.

27 May 2007

Added some external website links, mostly about parks and open spaces, rather than trees.

27 April 2007

Started adding or replacing some images, including new ones of flowers, taken in April.

20 Feb 2007

Added some content, including from Santamour and McArdle's checklist. Mostly on the botany page.

14 Feb 2007

Added some new links.

It's just over a month since this website went live, and most visitors are still going to the old site. So there is a marker now on all the important pages in the old site, saying that there are updated pages here.

3 Feb 2007

Minor rewriting and tweaking of several pages.

Found the linked article by Santamour and McArdle, 'Checklist of cultivated Platanus', published 1986. To be added to links collection.

27 Jan 2007

Revised Usage and Cultivation pages. Changed the html titles of several of the other pages. Published recent changes.

Found a reference to the tallest known London plane being at Bryanston School, Dorset, from bomeninfo.nl. Height given at 48.17m. See Wikipedia as well as http://bomeninfo.nl.

Carried out some estimation of tree heights, using a crude measurement of the shadows seen on Google maps satellite photos. For a comparison, a London double-decker bus was used, assumed to be 4.3m high. Estimated heights of the trees on the south side of the lake at St. James' Park was 36m. There were not that many other large trees to be found with measurable shadows, especially on winter photographs with shadows occupying a lot of space.

25 Jan 2007

Published revised photo pages for Digitata, Hackney Form, Westminster form, and Pyramidalis. Published this page.

Started to add minor links to the Links page.

23 Jan 2007

Added new photographs to the Digitata, Hackney Form, Westminster form, and Pyramidalis pages. Not published yet.

22 Jan 2007

Split the usage page into two new articles, Usage, and Cultivation. The usage article needs improving, with some more material on parks and street trees. Not published yet.

Found several plane trees listed at Trees for Cities or Great Trees of London. Those at Barn Elms and Friday Hill Chingford are new to me, need checking out at some time.

Found a method of making the SVG plan usable with Internet explorer, at Inline SVG but it needs to be rewritten with new SVG tags for ASV.

20 Jan 2007

Added some rewritten pages. Added also especially a rejigged copy of the SVG plans of Greater London page. This is an xml file, and is still only readable in Firefox or Opera.

12 Jan 2007

New website went live at http://www.aranya.co.uk/planes. It uses Google analytics for keeping track of usage statistics. The index page of the old site has been replaced with a link to the index page of the new site.

Brief history of the old site

The old website http://www.chengappa.demon.co.uk/planes was created at the beginning of 2000, and remained with minor changes until 2006. In late 2006, I began rejigging and rewriting the content. This was published at the new website at http://www.aranya.co.uk/planes, which went live on 12th January 2007. It was not finished then - there were more pages to be added after changes, more photographs to be included, and a fair bit of rewriting was needed.

The old site is intended to remain for some time, but the index page now has nothing but a link to the new site. All pages on the old website except the index page remain live.


Old statistics from Extreme tracking.

These are statistics for the old website. The counter was removed on 14 Jan 2007. It counted only the visitors to the index page, and hence understated the site's usage.

Counting since 15 February 2000. Average visitors per day 24. Highest per day 174, Sun 14 May 2006.

The content below for the old website was copied from Extreme tracking.

BrowsersUnique Visitors
 MSIE 6    38918    62.03%  
 MSIE 5    13543    21.58%  
 Netscape 6    6206    9.89%  
 Netscape 4    2096    3.34%  
 MSIE 4    862    1.37%  
 Netscape 3    642    1.02%  
 Other    240    0.38%  
 AOL 4    173    0.27%  
 MSIE 3    26    0.04%  
 WebTV 1    11    0.01%  
 AOL 3    5    0.00%  
 Cyberdog 2    1    0.00%  
 Netscape 14.25%  -  MSIE 85.04%  -  Other 0.69%

Operating SystemsUnique Visitors
 Windows XP    31709    50.54%  
 Windows 98    13238    21.10%  
 Windows 2000    8029    12.79%  
 Macintosh    3844    6.12%  
 Windows NT    2338    3.72%  
 Windows 95    1936    3.08%  
 Other    1151    1.83%  
 Linux 2    380    0.60%  
 WebTV    35    0.05%  
 Windows 3.1    20    0.03%  
 SunOS 5    17    0.02%  
 Windows ME    17    0.02%  
 FreeBSD    4    0.00%  
 IRIX    3    0.00%  
 AIX    3    0.00%  
 HP-UX    3    0.00%  
 OS/2    3    0.00%  
 OSF1    1    0.00%  
 Windows 91.32%  -  Mac 6.12%  -  Unix 0.65%  -  Other 1.89%