Thumbnail pictures added to two pages

While the rest of the trading and collecting nation is living it up at NOAC 2009 in Bloomington, IN I decided to distract myself with some site maintenance. I've been meaning to add thumbnail images of patches to the catalog listing pages for years now, but have always put it off until the site is generated dynamically from a database instead of static pages. That's proven to be more of an obstacle than I originally expected, so for the time being I've manually implemented thumbnails on several pages to see how they look.

The original page converted to thumbnail view was the Wahunsenakah Lodge flaps page and I've been pleased with the results, mostly because of the elegant way that the highslide zooming effect allows you compare multiple images (ie, NOAC delegate and trader issues from a particular year). I used the same size for the Colonial Virginia Council CSP, FOS, and JSP pages.

Based upon the dimensions of those thumbnail images I elected to go with 150 pixels wide as my default for the Kecoughtan Arrowhead and Round shaped emblem pages.

I am still on the fence about the final results. 150 pixels wide looks fine for flaps and CSP's but when the height of the image is the same or more the thumbnail images begin to overwhelm the page. Since the Kecoughtan Arrowhead and Round emblems pages don't have many items to list I'm not dissatisfied enough with the results to start over, but I don't think I can follow the same design for the Activity emblems page that has 100 different patches listed.

New Colonial Virginia Council pages

I've revised the shoulder patch pages for Colonial Virginia Council to include thumbnail pictures of each emblem and to split the Jamboree shoulder patches onto their own page separate from the CSPs and SAPs. JSP's aren't included in An Aid To Collecting Selected Council Shoulder Patches With Valuation Guide 2008 Edition by Austin, Ellis, & Jones, so it only made sense to give them a page of their own.

The new pages feature the ability to click on the thumbnail image to view a larger picture of the patch, and even allow you to zoom multiple images to compare them for differences. Eventually I plan to revise all of the patch pages to include thumbnail pictures to make patch identification and comparisons much easier. Let me know if you spot any typos or can contribute any additional information to make the data provided more complete!

Adding thumbnail pics to emblem listings

I came across a very cool new bit of code that inspired me to try adding thumbnail pictures to the emblem listings. I've considered adding these small images to help make it easier to identify an issue, but planned to wait until the site was converted from static web pages to one powered by a database.

But after I saw the very cool effects and options presented by highslide I had to try it out to see what the addition would look like. You can check out this sample page to see the results. Let me know in the comments if you think it's a positive change!

Glenn

Converting image views to Lighbox

I've spent several hours recently going through the site and converting the emblem image views to use Lightbox, a web presentation effect that places a dark translucent screen over the web page the image is linked from and displays the image centered with a white background.


While the effect is visually appealing, there are a couple of other reasons that I chose to implement it on this site.

The prior image presentation method of using popup windows was a serious pain to manually code and many browsers and adware/spyware blockers are configured to block popup windows.


The lightbox effect includes navigation when an image is displayed. If you mouse over the image you will see "next" and "previous" links so that you can view other images in a series (you can also use the "n" and "p" keys on your keyboard to accomplish this).

For example, you can go to the Kecoughtan Chenilles page, click on the link to the C1 emblem, and then proceed to view all of the other Kecoughtan chenilles by just pressing the "n" key on your keyboard while the lightbox effect is active.

I held off on a mass conversion of the site to lightbox until I could verify that the effect works without issues when browsing images from an Apple iPhone. I was mighty relieved when I saw it works fine on the iPhone's Safari browser since I was not at all eager to go back to popups or research another display solution. When I get a chance I will take some photos of Kecoughtan patch images from this site displayed on the beautiful iPhone LCD screen and post them to this blog.

RSS Feed updated

The RSS feed for the Kecoughtan Emblems and History Site news has been fixed and now updates correctly. If you would like to view the content of this site in your newsreader you can subscribe to the RSS feed here.

kecoughtan.com has a new host

After almost a decade of residing within my personal web space provided by Time Warner's Roadrunner service, the Kecoughtan Emblems and History site has moved to a new internet host, WireNine.com. The move was made to consolidate site resources and implement scripts and features that are beyond the scope of the Roadrunner personal site host. I am looking forward to implementing much more automation and revising the site to include many of the new web technologies that have developed since my site first appeared hosted on AOL.com and every update was over a dialup modem!

If you happen to notice a broken link or encounter any other anomaly please let me know so that I can address it. I expect it will take some time to uncover all of the items that didn't make the transition gracefully, and I appreciate your patience and help!

If you link to the prior site please update your links to http://kecoughtan.com - while I will set up redirects at the old site to point to the new one I can't promise they will be there forever.

Vote for your favorite Kecoughtan patches

Since it's July 4th weekend I had a little time to put together a poll for site visitors to vote for their favorite Kecoughtan Lodge flap patch and chenille patch.

The free service I used back in 1999 to create the original "favorite 463 flap" poll has long since disappeared from the internet, but it was easy to use SurveyMonkey.com to build a new poll that includes pictures of all of the patches. My first attempt created a web page about 1.5 MB for visitors to download due to the size of the images, and that is excessive for anyone still on dial-up connections.

Thankfully, a trip to VersionTracker led me to a free utility called ThumbsUp that quickly generated thumbnail images of the patch pictures, and I was able to get the size of the page down to a more reasonable 500K or so.

The poll is open until there are 100 respondents, since that's the maximum number allowed for free accounts. I'll post results from time to time so you can see what the consensus is. And if you complete the poll you will find out which Kecoughtan flap and chenille patches are my favorites!

Take the survey now (and tell your friends about it, too!)

Duck Calls Mentions kecoughtan.com

I arrived home from the College World Series yesterday to find a new edition of Duck Calls, the Wahunsenakah Lodge newsletter, waiting for me among the bills and other mail.

After reading about the recent SR-7A conclave I turned to an article that mentioned kecoughtan.com as a place to see pictures of new Colonial Virginia Council Scout camp. It took a moment to sink in that the article was referring to my web site!

Thanks to Newsletter Advisor Tim Ewing for the nice referral in Duck Calls. If this is your first visit to kecoughtan.com I hope you will take some time to look around and learn about the rich history and tradition that precedes Wahunsenakah Lodge.

And if you happen to have items that are missing from my site I will be very grateful if you can find a moment to share pictures of them with me so that I can continue to make this site more accurate and complete.

Site news moves to Blogger

The Kecoughtan Emblems and History site news has been transferred to this weblog, powered by Blogger. When I first began posting site news in 1999 options like Blogger weren't available, so every update was manually coded to a static web page. Six years later blogs make posting regular messages a task that takes just minutes, and the automatic generation of archives and XML feeds are bonuses.

With the new convenience of the Blogger-based site news I'm hoping to post news about changes and additions to the site far more regularly!

All of the old news is still online and linked in the sidebar of the Blogger generated news page, so you can relive the progress of the site in it's original hand-coded style!

Glenn