I decided to take a few day's break from the site updates, focusing instead on some technical improvements to the site's fabric. To keep you busy while this work is going on, here's one small addition in the Art & Memorabilia gallery:

• Spitfire Mk. VIII in Italy, a new pencil drawing by Pavel Rampir.
  
  
• Not a new addition, but one item to which I would like to draw your attention again, is this photo of No. 306 Squadron Spitfire Mk. IX. The new element is the excessive commentary added by an anonymous visitor. I once wrote that I'd like every picture in the Historic Photos gallery to tell a story, and this is a great example of how much can be achieved with a common effort. Thanks everyone who have added their comments to various photos so far.

It is also the Polish pilot's names in the above article that prompted me to work with the first technical issue during the weekend. With the default character set (Western European) hitherto used on this site, some of these peculiar Polish letters were not supported, refusing to show up correctly in the browser. The solution was converting the entire side to Unicode (UTF-8) standard, and this has been done during an evening's work. Now, there's no more guessing about the name of Żulikowski - well, maybe the pronunciation, but not the spelling :)

This addition and some of the email I've been receiving recently also show that there's a need for a discussion forum on this site. I have spent some time reviewing the available software for this purpose. There's plenty of sophisticated shrink-wrap bulletin board solutions available these days, but to begin with and test the feasibility of the idea, I'd rather have something more simplistic and easily accessible for the users. Thus we will start with a simple discussion forum, eventually dressing it up in features or converting to full BB standard as future interest grows. I think I have now an outline of suitable design, and should be able to set up a forum feature in a week or two.

Lastly, there have been issues with a commenting feature of the blog posts. Several users have pointed out that this function is not as easy to use as one might expect. It is hard for me to pinpoint exactly what the problems are, but the fact remains that the user interface for signing one's entry is unnecessarily confusing. This is enough for me to start looking for alternative solutions. This, however, will be my second priority after the discussion forum.

Labels: site updates, webmaster