Site news
What has changed on MineArchive and why. New features, design decisions and the occasional problem we hit along the way. The archive itself grows every day; this page is only for the changes to how the site works that are worth telling you about.
10 October 2026
MineArchive changes constantly, and most of the change is not news: new mines, new disasters, refreshed records and corrections arrive every day and are logged where they belong, on the records themselves. Every so often, though, the site itself changes in a way worth explaining: a new feature, a design decision, something we tried that did not work. Those changes now get a page of their own. This section is for the reader with a real interest in how MineArchive works, and each article sets out what changed, why, how to use it, and a little of what went on under the bonnet, including the problems we ran into. Every article ends with an invitation to tell us what you think, because the changes are made for readers and readers are the only test of whether they work.
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10 October 2026
Every region page on MineArchive carries a map of the mines in that county or district. Until this week it was a fixed picture: every mine we have plotted, all at once, with a link to the full map if you wanted to do anything more. The region map now has the same controls as the full map. A Show select switches it between mines and the disasters recorded at them, a commodity or incident-type filter narrows it, and two year sliders let you ask which mines were working at a given date, or which disasters fell within a span of years. The count line above the map says what you are looking at in words, so a slider position is never left to be guessed at. Along the way we found the map measuring its own frame before the page had finished laying it out, and a private curator panel quietly loading inside the frame and stealing a third of its height. Both are fixed, and the map is a good deal taller.
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MineArchive