Track-Link Site News

May is Weathing Month
Sat, May. 1, 2004

The special theme for May will be Weathering and is sponsored by MIG Productions. Modellers may submit to the site using the provided content submission tools any number of Weathering-related articles, gallery models and blog logs. Those that meet the site's content submission standards (refer to gallery submissions) and are published during the month of May 2004 are eligible. A special "rule" for this theme is that you must describe your weathering process.

For more information and questions refer to the topic on this in the General Forum. Weathinging Theme Month.

The Sherman Theme is now closed and the winners have been selected. Rob Erwin of FOrmations sponsored this theme with great enthusiasm, many thanks to Roab and Formations. See Rob's message in the General Forum.

Paul.

April is Sherman Theme Month
Thu, Apr. 1, 2004

We are going to start having a series of "Theme" Months to foster more site participation and provide more fun for modellers. Each of these themes will be sponsored by a small-medium sized after-market company who will be offering an item from their product line as a prize. The theme submission that best exemplifies that month's theme as selected by the sponsor will be awarded this prize.

The first theme will be the Sherman Tank and is sponsored by Formations Models. Modellers may submit to the site using the provided content submission tools any number of Sherman-related articles, reviews, gallery models and blog logs. Those that meet the site's content submission standards (refer to gallery submissions and review submissions) and are published during the month of April 2004 are eligible.

For more information and questions refer to the topic on this in the General Forum. Sherman Theme Month.

New Forum Software
Tue, Feb. 24, 2004

I have made some new forum software. It replaces the old news server and its web-based gateway. This one is entirely web-based and the messages are now stored in a database. Consequently, for the time being at least, you will not be able to access the forums with a stand alone news reader. I have plans to write an interface in the future. I tried to combine features from other popular forums and news readers.

Your email addresses now appear with your message, they are not readable to email harvesters. If you need to email a response to the author of a message just type in their email address. You can't cut & paste them unfortunately.

I have made some navigation improvements and hopefully eliminated two annoying problems, the double postings and the problem of people posting new topics instead of replies and vice-versa. Also the entire document collection going back until the year 2000 is available. I have plans to load the really old messages I still have on tape. These go back to 1997. At this time I have not been able to get my tape drive to work.

There are a few new forums, notably the "site" forums, these are for the discussion of new content added to the site. The web-based solution enables total integration with the news and web-site so in the future more features can be added.

There may be some problems around, if anything seems odd let me know. A few features do not yet work, image uploading and the search. I'll be adding these in the next couple of days.

Thanks,
Paul.

New Site
May 24, 2003

This is the new site. I rebuilt it from scratch to be more efficient and secure. Several resources have been integrated and are available on all sections. These include the messenger, search, content administration and contact forms. The administration areas for have been redesigned to make content flow more efficient which hopefully will mean that your content will get published quicker. This goes for member registrations too... I have added a new member administration area that streamlines the membership process considerably.

What you can't see is all of the optimization I did to the web-applications that run the site. The site is now 50% more efficient and the generated pages produce around 40% less bandwidth overhead.

I changed the basic font class and cleaned up some of the interfaces to make the site more visually pleasing in most browsers.

Now that I have a more efficient and programmatically organized site I shall be adding some new features in the near future. They will be revolutionary as far as what is currently available for you guys right now on the various model building web-sites.

Paul.