Liverpool Scottish:

Firstly the Liverpool Scottish Site: As you can see the site is very old looking. To be fair it has been created by the Hon. Sec with no professional support over a number of years but he does love his colours! It was also written using Frontpage. Getting rid of the frames and introducing CSS has pushed the site beyond Frontpages capabilities. Yes I know you can do almost anything in Frontpage but to go beyond the basics you need to understand html php and javascripts etc. and there are easier ways to do those than using Frontpage. Ultimately the plan is to have a virtual museum but phase one is to update the existing site. At the moment I’m reworking the seventy odd pages to modern standards. I expect to complete by mid January and will report my experiences once completed.

The Wrecks of Liverpool Bay:

The scanning has completed and I’ve OCRed the first batch of records. I found it a bit of a chore as my OCR software was just the bundled one with the cannon scanner. As the wreck cards are written using professional jargon and shorthand, ‘INS’ for insert for example the poor software was reduced to guessing. I have therefore splashed out and purchased (with real money!) ABBY’s OCR software Finereader. This is more accurate and once I’ve read the manual and played around a bit it started to learn so each card becomes more accurate. As the society is not meeting again until the end of January I am holding fire on this while I complete Task One above.

The future plans about the information are coming together as various members of the society want to use the cards as source data for further research with a view to producing a definitive ‘wrecks of Liverpool Bay’, hopefully on-line.

A second research project has also started based on a collection of 350 black and white negatives which have been donated to the society. This has started me looking at how to scan and store negatives and transparencies. So once the Liverpool Bay project is completed, as far as the IT bit anyway, I’ll be looking at that.

All the best to you all in the New Year and be sure the Mayans don’t get you!!

But time moves on and the wheel of life returns to the beginning … and all that stuff. So what now?

Since starting this project what is the (relevant) news? In the summer of 2010 I helped the local TA battalion (Liverpool Scottish) with their archive, which explains what happened to the site that summer. During the autumn and over Christmas I wrote my dissertation on the early adoption of radio in the Royal Navy. Following that, as part of the degree, I did a work placement at the Fusilier Museum in Bury in their archive (there is a pattern here). Being awarded my degree in May and being in the fortunate position of not needing to work for a living, I have been wondering what to do with my life.

So here we are, I have joined the Liverpool Nautical Research Society and started a project for the Maritime Museum cataloging the Mersey Docks & Harbourboard’s records of the wrecks of Liverpool Bay. The goal is, apart from producing a traditional finder’s aid, to plot the locations of the wrecks (sorry no treasure galleons) on googlemaps using the same interface as you use to find your nearest Tescos (Americans substitute “Starbucks”). I have also re-contacted the Liverpool Scottish and started helping them again.

How will this effect this site? Well the original aim was to explore how the internet can help develop academic understanding of History and I think the Google project is right up that street so over the coming months I will attempt to record the development of the project.

So as they say watch this space and hopefully it won’t be two years before the next post!

One of the planned changes was to add one of those little icons that show up in the address line and on your bookmarks. Ian told me it was called a Favicon and that as browsers cache this info when a site is bookmarked then I needed to make the change now or nobody would see it!

As I already had an image I wanted to use I set about the job this morning. First problem was the image did not transfer very well to being only 16×16 pixels, it was too detailed. The image was of a 15th century capital T with all that fancy leaf work,so I had to simplify it not a pretty image at full scale but not too bad when reduced to icon size.

I then had a quick look via google to find out how to install it and found this entry  here so that was easy enough, I edited my test site (on a USB stick) and tested it. Spend more time finding out how to un-cashe the old site from my browser so I could see the change. Then uploaded the new header and icon file. Bobs you uncle site has a new favicon.

Welcome,

If you have read the editorial you will see why I have been moved to create this site. This series of posts will act as a journal of my journey no the development of this site. The site is starting at a very simple level and will develop in sophistication, I hope, over time.

While I was an IT professional my background is in large corporate databases and severs not in the technologies and techniques of web design. Hopefully my experience of IT will allow me to avoid too many errors but my lack of web based knowledge will allow non-IT readers to understand and appreciate how a site such as this may be built. That said what am I doing to site site at the moment?My first post is based on an essay I submitted for a course on the Origins of the Two World Wars. It is the first to be published about my current primary interest Military History. The development of the site is concentrating on uploading a number of links which I find useful and interesting. The Site plan is next to set up a counter to see if any one is actually visiting the site. I will also be looking into RSS what ever that is