News and Comment on Orders of Battle.com

Aug

3

Research Update

August 3, 2010 | Leave a Comment

I am still working my way through the War Diary of 1 Battalion The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada; which is quite involved as it was a very well-travelled battalion!! Right now, I am up to October 1944 and hope to finish the complete War Diary before too long.

As I am in Seattle still, I do not have the opportunity to spend time at the National Archives in Ottawa, but I hope that I will be able to return to Ottawa in the not so distant future. In the meantime I have plenty of material to work on.

I am still working on the component units of 2 Panzer Division and hope to be complete soon.

On the UK Regimental front, I am working my way through the battalions of the Durham Light Infantry.

On the US side, I have input some information on 24 and 25 Infantry Divisions, but as they served in the Pacific, I do not have the same level of information as on those divisions that served in North West Europe. 

Â

Aug

3

Status Update

August 3, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Data Input is currently on a slight hiatus as I will be making some database level changes soon to some tables primary keys.

Some reference tables currently have string values as primary keys and I will be changing the database structure soon to convert these tables to have new integer columns as their primary keys.

As a result, not only do I have to alter the database structure, add additional columns etc; I have also had to make quite a few changes to the code of my data input application. This is now complete and all I have to do now is make similar changes to the web site application itself and test it against the new database design.

I have not changed the web database yet, but I have now rebuilt my development and laptop bases and am working on changing the server databases soon.

Once this is all copmplete, normal service will be resumed.Â

May

1

Well, it has been four months since I last posted here so I have been pretty lax about updating!!

The orders of battle website is pretty much back to normal after various layout changes and I hope that it will stay like this for a while, although I am considering hiring a design company sometime to make it look more professional, as I certainly do not have the design skills necessary to do that.

I have been onsite in Seattle for the last couple of months and before that I was pretty busy looking for a new contract which was not the easiest thing in the current economic climate.

Seattle is a pretty nice city and I can walk to work. The views from the ferries across Puget Sound are very nice as you can see both the snow-capped mountains of the Olympic Peninsula to the west and the snow-capped Cascades to the east. Mount Rainier is pretty impressive and dominates the landscape.

As I am away from home, I do not have access to my library so I have been concentrating on a few areas:

Unfortunately as I packed in a bit of hurry when I left home in arly March, I do not have my definitive guide to the Rifle Volunteer Corps units so I am not able to input their evolution into the Territorial Force of 1908, I am creating the Unit definitions themselves but will have to go back and cover them properly when I get home.

Veit Scherzer who writes and publishes an extremely useful new series on German Divisions has a new site listing his upcoming books. It can be found at http://www.verlag-scherzer.de/index.html .

Jan

1

Well, now that I am back at home, I have had some extra time to devote to things that have been on the back burner for too long, one of which is the design and layout of ordersofbattle.com .

I have finally fixed the problem with the Unit Updates web page.

I have also changed the colour scheme of the site to maroon/green on off-white. I hope that it will be easier to read than the previous colour scheme.

I have also added a new web page, the Master Person Index, which will allow users to query Person records across Nations, so for example, one could query on “Schmidt” and see all Person records with a surname of “Schmidt”.

I have also added filter textboxes to the Person Index and Unit Index wen pages to speed up data access so that users no longer have to retrieve all records for a particular Nation to see a specific Person or query all Commonwealth Infantry Battalions just to find one battalion in particular.

If you have any queries or questions, please let me know at webmaster@ordersofbattle.com .

Jan

1

Happy New Year!!

January 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Wishing all my visitors a very Happy New Year!!

Â

Nov

14

Photography Update

November 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Well, my life in Ottawa continues to be pretty dull as I am kept busy exercising the digital camera in the Archives on most week nights!

Here is a bit of a progress report for you all.

Examined in full but not photographed:

Photographed in full:

Photographed in part:

To do next week:

So, I have been keeping busy, but there is a long way to go and I do not know how long I will be in Ottawa.

Nov

3

About three weeks ago, I finally managed to deploy the new version of the ordersofbattle.com website up to the webserver. As regular readers will know, this new version uses LINQ and this resolves some of the issues with the previous version with the Home and Country Pages and the Appointments Page.

The only issue right now is that the Unit Updates Page is not returning any data. I have fixed this and will deploy the fix in the near future.

We had an issue this week where for a day none of the data pages worked. This was caused by the counter file being scrambled by a brief power failure and as every data page writes to the counter file, well you can see the problem!

I am current concentrating on photographing war diaries in Ottawa which does not give me a lot of time to concentrate on data entry or developing the code.

I am working on new forms for my windows data input application and I am also working on changing the look and feel of the web site to make it easier to read.

Oct

8

As I mentioned in the previous post, I have been spending a lot of time in the National Archives in Ottawa which does not give me much free time to focus on other things.

That said, I have completed development of the new version of the orderofbattle.com website which will fix the current issues with Appointments, the Home page etc. The only thing I have left to do is the Order Of Battle Treeview Page which I might defer for a while in order to get the rest of the site deployed.

The look and feel will be identical but I am hoping to start adding new features and pages soon.

This new version uses LINQ for Entities and the Entity Framework instead of TSQL Stored Procedures.

Oct

8

Digital Photography

October 8, 2009 | 1 Comment

A few weeks ago, the National Archives in Ottawa changed its policy regarding digital photography outside staff hours so that I can now photograph original War Diaries with my digital camera.

Given that I do not know how long I will be in Ottawa, I am trying to photograph as many Battalion War Diaries as I can while I have the chance.

Using super macro mode on the camera works really well and the documents come out clearly.

So, the last few weeks, I have been in the Archives almost every night.

This has obviously reduced the amount of time I have to actually read and interpret them, input data into the database and work on finishing the new version of the website, but that said, it is worth it as it is so much more useful to have the original to work from.

So far, I have photographed some or all of the following Battalions:

I hope to start the following Battalions next week:

Â

Sep

18

The ordersofbattle.com website is still having some issues as I have not deployed the new version of the website code yet. I hope to do that this weekend with a bit of luck.

I have been concentrating on research the last few weeks so code development and debugging has been lagging.

The upcoming version of the website will use the new LINQ and Entity Framework code that has been developed over the past few months so I am just fixing issues in the LINQ code that relate to the webpages. This is almost complete, I just have the Units pages to do, plus a couple of the reference pages.

I have also been having a couple of issues with my data input software, the windows client, that I have had to resolve. It is working well on the whole but I have had a couple of minor things to fix.

I am sorry that the website has not been perfect; currently it is still running code that is several years old, but that will change soon.

Thanks for your patience.