Late January
It is amazing how much one can learn from analytics. For example, I made available a handful of PDF files on the Spline. A pure product of XSTS, they are small in size (less than a page of Word text) and yet they contain what I think could be useful information for the riders of any bus line in any town in any country in the world.
Stats never lie.
What do the stats tell ? That while I have few visitors (1-2 every day, there is a tremendous quantity of PDF files downloaded every day. Literally the whole set. I suspect certain search engine to be behind this and after all, I’m perfectly fine with it. If the files can serve the general population, the more, the better. There is a catch. There is always one.
The safety catch
Suppose you have your own website hosted on a server. For various reasons, you have made some nice reports available to the public. A typical such report can have 20-100 pages and weight about 10 megabytes (10 MB). Not very large, yet, by no means a small one. As many people know, hosting a website means there is a data plan, involving a certain monthly traffic. Each time a 10 MB file is downloaded, that value is subtracted from the plan limit. Which is in many cases some 10 gigabytes. In order to keep things short, let’s say that the data plan allows you some 1000 downloads of the file every month. And I have left out site browsing, which should be the main data consumer.
As a month has 30 days, simple math tells us that the famous PDF report could be downloaded roughly 30 times per day. And as you are a report maker, there may be more than one file. Two files, the daily limit goes down to 15. Three and you are down to 10. More than that and there are some problems with your data plan.
Bottom point
If you offer large files for free (or even with a landing page), make sure you are ready to become popular.For example, host the large files in a place outside the control of the data plan.
Mid January
Now, XSTS is able to generate printable timetables. The customers of a public transit agency could benefit from the presence of such tables at every station.
The Spline 