Guild Catalogs

GAD

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I'm developing quite the collection of Guild catalogs and price lists and was toying with the idea of scanning them all and making them available on my website, mostly because some of the more rare items only seem available from people charging money for PDFs of them which I find infuriating.

Would that be something of interest to the Guild world at large, or am I in the minority being on the constant hunt for catalogs?
 

twocorgis

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I'm developing quite the collection of Guild catalogs and price lists and was toying with the idea of scanning them all and making them available on my website, mostly because some of the more rare items only seem available from people charging money for PDFs of them which I find infuriating.

Would that be something of interest to the Guild world at large, or am I in the minority being on the constant hunt for catalogs?

It would certainly be of interest to me, and a large percentage of the folks on LTG Gary! That's a great public service should you decide to do it. :eagerness:
 

walrus

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As you know from buying a few of them from me, I am very interested! That would be great!

walrus
 

Stuball48

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"Yes Sir" and I am in and if you are any money providing such a service, I will chip in my part.
 

AcornHouse

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:eagerness::eagerness::eagerness::eagerness::applouse::applouse::applouse::applouse:
 

GAD

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"Yes Sir" and I am in and if you are any money providing such a service, I will chip in my part.


No money, but thanks for the offer. I do all this because I love to write and it helps to keep my chops up. It also turns into people offering me rare Guilds, and that's all the payment I need (though it often costs me thousands). :emmersed:
 

GAD

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OK - looks like a quorum. I've got some stuff scanned and I recently got some very hard to find items that Grot's helped me with in the past so I might be able to stop harassing him (doubtful). I'll need to figure out what the best format for all of this is and how it can most logically be presented. Some of this stuff is easy, but some of it, like the late '90s Guild Gallery magazines, have a lot of pages which make it all a bit more complicated.
 
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fronobulax

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OK - looks like a quorum. I've got some stuff scanned and I recently got some very hard to find items that Grot's helped me with in the past so I might be able to stop harassing him (doubtful). I'll need to figure out what the best format for all of this is and how it can most logically be presented. Some of this stuff is easy, but some of it, like the late '90s Guild Gallery magazines, have a lot of pages which make it all a bit more complicated.

What? Isn't there an open source content management system that understands scanned documents? ;-)
 

GAD

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What? Isn't there an open source content management system that understands scanned documents? ;-)

LOL. Well played.

Seriously, though, I'd rather keep it in the same software already in use before spinning up more. You do raise a good point that I may be able to use a Wiki Plugin to make things much simpler. Thanks!
 

GAD

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Here's a test. Thoughts?

http://www.gad.net/Blog/guild-catalogs-price-lists/


And kudos to Frono for smacking me upside the head with some knowledge-base snark, because that's exactly what I needed to make it work. Well, that and a PDF embedder plugin, and some tweaking, and some more tweaking, and some hair-pulling... but mostly it was the well-deserved snark that did it. :emmersed:
 
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GAD

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Damn, that's cool, GAD.

Fro is the master of well-placed snark. ;)

Thanks!

I'm not sure how well the format will scale, but I'll just need to add lots more stuff to see. I also made damn sure that the embedded PDFs could be downloaded because that's what started me being pissed off in the first place.
 

GAD

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I'm not terrifically happy with the layout, but it works. I'm much rather have thumbnail previews of the files, but that takes up a lot of space.

I also don't like the naming convention I've used because, while it works well within the categories, it doesn't in the search results. Example:

S100 - 1994 <- that's a result in the search result, but what is it? It's a wiring diagram. But if I make the name S100 Wiring Diagram - 1994, then the categories look all cluttered. Given the inherent limitation in the format, I may have to adopt something like [W] S100 - 1994 for wiring and [A] S100 - 1994 for an advertisement. I'm still mulling all that over.

I tend to be a fan of naming things in useful ways because that's how we used to find things (by looking for them in logically named folders, for example), but watching my kids use a computer it's become obvious that all they care about is the search engine working well. If Google went away they would be unable to use the Internet. Same with a Mac - they have no idea where apps are or where documents are - they just search for them every time. Just an observation on how people access data.
 

adorshki

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Fro is the master of well-placed snark. ;)
Lewis Carroll didn't just give us Mad Hatters and slithy toves, y'know.

Can you find the Snark hidden in this picture?:

640px-Lewis_Carroll_-_Henry_Holiday_-_Hunting_of_the_Snark_-_Plate_8.jpg


How about this one?:

avcruz_1_01.jpg


Not to be confused with a snipe:

SnipePintail-2a-Malim-Nawar-Perak-Malaysia-2nd-March-2014.jpg


Itself not to be confused with a guttersnipe:
the-guttersnipe.jpg


This concludes today's entomology lesson.

starship-troopers-1997-movie-review-bug-roughneck-killed.jpg
 

GAD

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Whelp, there's another day where I spent too much time working on the wrong thing. :emmersed:

I've got a bunch of stuff uploaded, most of it already in a format conducive to the project. I now have the following categories:

Catalogs
Price lists
Wiring Diagrams
Advertising
Schematics & Manuals
Magazine Content
Miscellany

It's easy to add a category and to rearrange them. Surprisingly what's not easy is linking already written articles into the knowledge base. With the plugin I used, It's like a completely different database.

The main thing I don't like right now is that there's no way to search for "Nightbird" and have it pull up the documents that contain that. That's a limitation of it not being a "real" knowledge base, but if I put in a description on the page where the catalog is located containing all of the models in the catalog, that would fix that. Seems like work, though. :)

It also blows my mind how many catalogs don't have dates on them.
 

fronobulax

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It also blows my mind how many catalogs don't have dates on them.

And how many catalogs don't change from year to year...

When you are ready put out a call for more info. There is a Starfire II (bass) wiring diagram, for example.
 
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