User talk:John Stanton

I have just created a user account, and am now officially part of your site!

I'm not too swift on this kind of thing. I got to the place where I can leave you messages through the link you provided, but don't know how to get here through the web site. I only get to User talk:John Weaver. Do I leave messages at that location or is there a way to go from there to here? Sorry about being "discussion group challenged"!

John

Welcome aboard! You can leave messages on any Talk or Discussion page and I will find it. You can see my personal page at User:John Stanton and you have a personal page at User:Jrweaver and a user talk page at User talk:Jrweaver. John 23:52, 26 January 2008 (EST)

John - I found it! An old dog can learn some new tricks after all.

I responded to your e-mail with the two forts I forgot - Hancock and the Advanced Redoubt. I'm now up to 42 forts.

Not listed as forts are the appurtenant structures. Fort Winthrop, for example, in Boston Harbor is not listed as a fort. The towers at Charleston, Tybee Island, Key West (2), and New Orleans (2) and the battery at Bayou Bienvenue (Battery Bienvenue) are also not part of the list of 42.

I also didn't include the Northern Frontier forts, as Totten did not include them is the system in his reports. He listed them as a separate entity. He stated that the forts of the Third System were to be manned by militia artillery, while the Northern Frontier forts were to be manned by regular army. This seems like a minor difference, but it was really representative of a whole different philosophy of defense.

Sorry - once I get started it's hard to turn off!

I better sign off for the night. I've got a miserable meeting at 8:00 AM tomorrow. I'll be the one dealing out the misery, but it still won't be much fun for anyone there - including my boss and his boss. I'm not looking forward to it!

Take care, John

Thanks for clearing things up for me. I moved some of your excellent comments to the Third System Forts page and I'll work on better integrating them as time allows. Any suggestions/edits welcome. John 22:28, 29 January 2008 (EST)

Hello

Hi John, I have wanted to add some Michigan/Indiana and Ontario forts for a while, thought I would give it a shot now! :-) Thanks for the welcome :-) ~~ MarkDilley

Hi Mark, with the recent update to MW 1.12 my create forts form has a slight bug so it messes up the map code :-( Not to worry I'll fix any that go bad! John 21:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Great John, will point other interested folks from my clan to here now that I have set foot in it. Best, MarkDilley

Hi

Hey John I saw your message on my talk page. I think I am ready for those picture pointers. Nightshade 17:56, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Oh and on a side note I live in Salem as well.

No problem, I'll work on the Fort Columbia pages, standardizing them and such. I'll do as much as I can on that. I'll see you in a while.

Ok

Ok John I am ready to receive picture pointers.

Pictures

Hi John. Could you do me a big favor. I need the following images and their pages removed

Crenshaw-04.jpg

I deleted it John 23:49, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

This picture is a duplicate that I accidentally uploaded to the site. Thanks!

Links to Battery Pages Broken?

Hi John. I think that the links to the specific batteries in the fort pages are broken. I noticed this when I was visiting the Fort Columbia page when I was planning to work on the Battery Ord page. If you can look into this that would be great. Nightshade

Great catch Nightshade! I changed the template for the battery list a while ago and did not notice the unintended consequences on the older battery work, so sorry! Should be fixed now, many thanks. John 02:49, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

BTW I made a grand tour of the Puget Sound Coastal Defense Forts two weeks ago and I'm busy building out the battery pages for them. Working on Fort Worden now. John 02:56, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

I saw them and they are some great looking examples of coastal artillery. I was actually planning my next coastal artillery trip outside the Columbia River mouth to the Puget Sound area. Looks like from the pics you took I am in for a treat should I ever go there. Oh and thanks for looking into that link issue for me. I am looking through my pics of Battery Ord right now and should be posting my best ones in the next few days if don't get too busy. Nightshade 20:31, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

It was a great trip and you should not miss them, especially Fort Worden and Fort Casey. Check out my new blog at http://usforting.com/ for a description of the Fort Worden trip, more to come. I also visited Fort Stevens over the weekend and got a great tour of Battery Mishler and that is on the blog also. I just finished updating the pages for Fort Stevens and Battery Mishler. John 03:14, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

That is awesome that you took the tour. As you know I took the tour myself last summer but never really got to posting my own pics mostly because I seem to be busy on the Fort Columbia pages and posting my pics might of spoiled for you a great tour. So I just contributed the text information of the page based on my own research and from what the tour guides told me. However you were the lucky one since it was only you and your wife with the tour guides. I was in a group of about 5 to 7 if I recall and I was always the last one behind catching up because I was taking pictures. I will post my own tour pics to supplement your own. I noticed your blog. Such a neat idea and I would love to contribute to it.

Web Site Question

Hi John:

I created a web site called ushikingtrails.com using Joomla, however I have found the architecture to be difficult to maintain, and not very user-friendly. I have started redesigning the site, and am going to use Mediawiki. The form that you use for adding Forts is exactly what I would like to do for adding trail information. But being a Mediawiki newbie, I'm struggling to figure out how to do it. Would you be good enough to point me in the direction of how you built your form? I've found various pieces of forms documentation on Mediawiki, but nothing that makes it all come together for me.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Ron Sherwood

ron (at) ushikingtrails.com

Hi Ron, welcome aboard! I use the Form extension by Evan Prodromou at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Form and it works pretty good for me. I still have a couple of glitches to work out that appeared when I upgraded to MediaWiki 1.12 but nothing too serious. I love Evan's extension and use it in several wikis. Every form application requires two pages, one in the MediaWiki Namespace that defines the form and one in the Template Namespace that defines the structure of the resulting article. Just examine the samples that come with the extension and you should be able to see how it works. Let me know if you need help. John 20:07, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Hi John: Thanks!! I have the extension installed, and the sample forms working in my wiki. Now to develop my own. I did have one other question: Are the links to Googlemaps, the topos, etc. built into your template - or do you add those manually after the fact? I really appreciate the help! Hope you don't mind if I bug you again if I come up with any other questions. (And maybe I can come up with a Fort or two to add to your site!)

Hey Ron, you got that working quickly! I have the Form build out the entire structure of the page since it is a bit complex. The Google Maps extensions does not work well inside templates so you have to put the code on every page but I use templates where possible to simplify adding structured data.

Hi John: Once I studied the Form extension documentation and looked at your site a little more, it all clicked for me. Thanks again for your help. I really appreciate it!

Hello John I do have 3 pictures of http://fortwiki.com/Camp_Warner_%282%29. Or as the locals know it "New" Camp Warner. How do I go about posting them on here? Your latitude and longitude is within 200 feet of the parade ground. Also the building you see on the map is not from the fort but from a family that resided there in the late 1800s.

You can upload pictures using the "Upload File" option in the "toolbox" menu. Once you upload them I will take care of putting them on the page. Thanks for the info. (putting this reply in my talk page and your talk page) John 02:07, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks John, I went ahead and added 3 pictures of "New" Camp Warner. Also I will be at Fort Harney in a couple of weeks at a Family event so I will be sure to get some pictures of the remains of the fort as well.

Great! I'll get these up tonight, you can look at the markup when I get done and you should be able to figure out how to do it, it's easy after the first one. John 02:33, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

The Dent house is on the site. Its actually located right in front of where the Enlisted Men's Barracks were located. I'm not sure whether the building was built out of the remains of the fort or not. I don't believe that it was because most of the fort was built of logs and this building isn't.