Unfortunately, I was not able to do any work relating to the website done this weekend. However, I will have the 3rd of July off in observance of Independence Day, so I should be able to get a lot done that weekend.

Finished Updating Basic Format

I plugged the old kluged table from the original crews page into a page with the CSS layout which I use on other pages. I'll reformat the crews page entirely in a while but now at least you can smoothly navigate the site from the top nav bar. The crews table now also has rows that are more evenly spaced and scalable so that's a big improvement.

This coming weekend I may be able to finish the scanning activities for now. The other part of the stuff that I have is a log.

VPB-119

I'm trying to tear myself away but this was an interesting find and I didn't want to lose the link.

That's It For This Weekend

In addition to finishing scanning of the Hanan scrapbook, I also converted my comments page and links page to the new format. You can see the practical benefit of the new look by zooming the page (usually done by holding the CONTROL key and turning the mouse scroll wheel). Instead of the page just increasing in size overall, the text increases in size and the page format resizes to accomodate the larger text, but not change its horizontal proportions. This should be a boon for folks with macular degeneration or other vision disabilities because they won't have to scroll horizontally if they zoom the page. It also makes the page file size half of what it was and also more Google-friendly.

Also, I added two more images from the Hanan photos, starting here.

I also updated and added some links on the links page.

Talk to you next weekend!

The VPB-118 Book

I just thought to search Amazon.com to see if anyone on there is selling the VPB-118 book. There are three sellers with the book. The seller with the lowest price wants $89.99. The seller with the highest price wants $149.55. I wondered how he arrived at that price. Anyway, if you have the book hang on to it, and if you have any spares, hang onto those too, so that family members can get the book without paying such outlandish prices.

Two new pages

Here are two new pages and as promised they are shots of two ships under attack, one a coastal trawler and the other a "fox tare charlie" which is naval nomenclature for a 4,000 gross ton freighter transport. These ships were used for transport from mainland Asia (via Korea) to Japan. The idea was to starve Japan's island industrial economy to weaken its war machine. The PBY4-2 was ideally configured for this kind of search and destroy mission.

More Progress

I just finished scanning John Hanan's photo album. The last several images in the album are photos of attacks on two different ships. I will probably post a representative image from each series.

It's too late to post any more images this evening but I'll be back tomorrow and report after I make some new pages on the website.

New Images on the Site

I scanned and coded diligently this afternoon and have a nice new page to show for my efforts. I've been studying web design lately and hopefully you will notice that the new page has a much slicker appearance than what preceded it. I hope to redo the entire site soon to make it more attractive, easy-to-use, and standards-compliant. For example, folks who might be using screen readers should be having a better experience on the new pages since they won't be loaded down with a lot of archaic HTML. A nice benefit of the accessibility improvement is that it will also show up better in search engines.

Here's the new page. I have also a number of other images that I haven't put in pages yet, so please don't think that one page isn't much to show for an afternoon's work, because there's more that you can't see - yet.

Now I'm going to get something to eat; I'm hungry!

Rogers Fiedler

Yesterday we got word from the Fiedler family that Rogers Fiedler of the Rinehart Crew has passed away. I should think that anyone who met Rogers would have enjoyed his genial, friendly attitude. He and his family hosted the reunion in Saint Charles, Missouri in 2004, much to the enjoyment of all that attended. Rogers will sure be missed. Here's the obituary.

I'm going to work on some scans this weekend; I should be posting some on the actual website later on. I'll dedicate this weekend's work to Rogers.