UltimateRack Medal Wiki

[John Asendorf]

I've been working on a little project that will hopefully grow to be a source for all medal information for all sorts of current and historical medals, orders and other awards by both military and civilian organizations.

http://ultimaterack.ajandj.com/wiki

Everyone is encouraged to sign-up for the wiki and make whatever additions, changes, etc. to the wiki they can/want. I figured this would be an excellent way for people who aren't "techies" to get involved with the UltimateRack project.

Although UltimateRack is (for now) designed as an American military rack builder. Once I have cleaned up this mess of code I've written I would like for it to be able to be used for all sorts of ribbon racks to include world-wide military... civil air patrol, firefighters, police organizations, etc.

So, give the wiki a try... if you have questions... I'll be making a Wiki forum for people to use, go there.

John

[pingjocky]

Here's a question...mind you, this is just curiosity speaking...but why are you "branching out" when you are having difficulties even keeping this site running correctly? You still don't have the order of precedence correct for NATO medals on a Navy set-up or the silver "E" for the Navy marksmanship ribbons (to name a few). Isn't this akin to "I can't walk down the block without running out of breath, but the Boston Marathon is next week, so what the heck - I'll give it a shot"? Wouldn't it be prudent to get this site 100% before adding to it? Just my .02.

R/
Pingjocky

[mechinfantry]

I kinda get what you mean by that. But how I see it if John starts up new programs or what ever then he can fix it while it is building instead of Ultimaterack is done start new project and boom UR is not working at all. Thats just how I see it. But I do get your point.

PS John, Did you get the Gold Braid/ Unit Citation fixed for Army yet??????????????????????????????????????????????

[John Asendorf]

That's a fair question.

Setting up the wiki was easy... the coding for the rack builder is harder. I've had many requests from people who want to get involved, who are interested in medals, ribbons, orders, etc. and the wiki is an easier way for people to get involved. Not everyone has the abilities of mechinfantry who has contributed so much.

Having more pages (via the wiki) will also drive more visitors to UltimateRack which will hopefully help us find more people who are interested on the National Guard side (and CAP, and firefighters, etc.) so that the expansion of UltimateRack will have more users making it more worthwhile to expand the core application which is UltimateRack. Don't get me wrong... while I'm happy that a couple score of users have found this a worthwhile project, it's tough justifying the time spent coding for a group the size which is currently interested.

So, to make an area which less tech savvy users can contribute and to make the site larger so as to increase the potential of a web searcher to find us are the two main reasons which were in my head,



Anyone with PHP coding experience is welcome to the UR code and is welcome to help me fix the problems pingjocky brought up. 2006 is going to see a pretty big rework of the flow of the program anyways... due to mechinfantry's prodigious work on the National Guard ribbons the main page is just becoming too unwieldly to open effectively over a modem connection. So, give this one guy a break and keep offering up those suggestions to fix stuff and I'll see what I can do.


John