The EH Archives
Introduction
Right now, you can look at all of the old submissions of Battlecry, The Dark Sentinel, and various other newsletters by reading the past issues. That's great if you want to read a whole issue, but what if you wanted to read a particular story. You may have read a story recently that you liked and wanted to read some more of their work, had a story recommended to you, or if you want to remember if you posted one of your own stories once before.
In that case, you're in trouble. You'll have to browse through every newsletter until you find the pieces of work you want. It's then you will be thinking, "If only...if only someone would make an archive of all of this work that helped me find the work I want!!!"
Well, that's what Battlecry is now going to do. Not only do I want to make an archive that contains all of the past work ever done, but to make it like a database so you can find the work that you want quickly and easily. I was also thinking of a random button so you can discover a new story whenever you wanted to read something new.
How will this be done?
To do this project, we'll probably just browse through all of the old newsletters available and add them to the database. They won't just be Battlecry issues either, the majority will probably be from the Fleet-Wide newsletter Dark Sentinel. I'll be making requests from the editors of the newsletters to use the old submissions, and then I (and hopefully a few volunteers) will go through them extracting old stories, graphics, reports, features and so on.
I think that would be the best ways of getting the submissions, rather than getting them from each writer. Over time they may have left the EH, lost their work, not bother sending in their submissions and so on. I will remove any work from the archive if requested though. Also, more time will be needed to request other people who have archives (like DB Krath houses, the Senate and so on) to allow us to show their submissions too.
Can I help in anyway?
All that red-tape mentioned above will be my work, and that should allow others to do the other more interesting tasks. I'm not going to be able to do all of this work myself, and I am making a plea for volunteers to help me. There are a number of jobs going, and here are a list of them: -
Website & Database Creators - Basically, I need people who are clever enough to make the online database I want. I can't do it myself as I'm no good at that stuff (I'm just a hack-writer), but if you can, please contact me!!! If all else fails, I'll just bug some CD people to do it for me :o)
Extractors - Sorry, I couldn't think of a better name for that. In this job you would have to go through some past newsletters, pull out all of the stories, graphics and reports, and convert them into .html format (except from the graphics of course). These pages will then be used in the archives. You will have to have some html knowledge to do this, but for this you'll be better off with a program like MS Frontpage or Netscape Composer so you can simply cut and paste. Pretty easy, eh?
If you want to help, just get in contact with me at werdna_elbee@ehnet.org, and maybe cc: your superior too to show how active you are.