Slowly coming together

 
Things are starting to move forward with the website with the structure and design slowly starting to come together. Unfortunately my plan to use a predesigned theme to help with the appearance has proved more complicated than I expected with a number of the elements on the homepage hard coded in making it really difficult to change them. Thankfully Pat Gibbs has been on hand to help me out with these tricky elements and I think it's finally coming together.
 
The archive is all up and running although there are still images to add to the entries and even a few to remove. I'm hoping that for the larger documents that I have photographic records of I'l be able to enter a single pdf document with all the images, or if it's a collection of smaller pamphlets in a scrapbook a collection of pdf's, one for each pamphlet. Hopefully this should make them much easier for people to handle and view. As yet the archive is only set up forthe upload of imaged so we'll have to wait and see if it can be done...
 
The biggest development so far though is with the model of the camp. It's only going to be Camp 2 for now but it looks like I've found a way to add a Google Earth plug-in to the site so that it will be possible to view the camp within the website instead of having to download the file and view it seperately in Google Earth. The only thing holding me back with this is the size of the model. The initial one I made was fairly complex and ended up being enormous so I've had to go back to the drawing board a bit in order to scale it down and make it a bit more usable. Fingers crossed it's going to work and you'll be able to view a virtual element of the camp soon. Alongside this I'm also hoping to have a map layer with a plan of the camp and a series of images from around the various camps such as the tennis courts in Camp 4 and the allotments on the headland at the back of the camp. 
 
My next tasks are to finish tweaking the front page and to sort out the front end pages for the various elements of the site. As I've already mentioned, the archive's up and running so it's just a question of adding in a page to explain how it works and to provide a link to a few collections made up of the archive material based around a number of themes such as carved bonework, physical activities and postage. 
 
The forum and blog are all up and running so again it's just a case of making a front page for them telling people how to use them and for these elements about how to log in so they can post. My plan for now is to make it pretty easy to post in the forum but to keep the blog more selective. Obviously I'll be continuing to post but my hope is to have some guest blogs as well from a variety of people with knowledge of the camp. 
 
Will blog again soon when things have advanced some more.