St Helens Rolls of Honour

[Dave]

Relaunching St Helens Rolls of Honour within St Helens Connect is going to be a little bit exciting (not for everyone, but it will be for me). Back in 2011, it was quite a big project to take on, and I was aided and abetted by Chris Ormrod and Stephen Nulty (who are both sadly no longer with us). We were joined by others on the team, and the site was relatively popular.

Problems cropped up on the old server account when the database was crippled by an upgrade to the underlying software. That, along with issues with the St Helens Connect forum software, led to me being quite an unhappy chappy, where things seemed to be insurmountable and everything had to go. Although SHROH would still work (and still works) with older versions of the underlying software, those versions are now being withdrawn from more modern server environments. Anyway, enough of the lamenting; the project is now back on. It will take some time to get it back to how it should be because things will need to be rebuilt.

Go to the site

[Southlancsman]

Cheers Dave.
Ste M

[Burlington]

Good news Dave

[HORT]

Great News Dave, please let us know as you progress.

[Dave]

Hurdles with PHP 8.

[devonboy]

Great news Dave I have alot of relatives on there

[Dave osullivan]

Excellent news

[Dave]

Still developing. I was stuck on something for a while, but Google's Gemini helped out quite a bit. It also helps to not to make stupid errors in code.

[LancashireLass]

Thank you! I look forward to the updates and seeing the information again

[Dave]

An update is that I'm trying to find a working solution for parsing some of the BBCode in content on WW1 casualty pages. The previous BBCode parser that we used on the old site no longer works on PHP v8.2.

To keep things uniform and to make things easier for site editors, the BBCode implementation is similar to what we use in forum posts:

The demo I put into this post has been taken offline while more work is completed.

[familyman]

Haven't a clue what your talking about Dave but glad th see SHROH will be back

[Ratty]

Sounds like you could do with some help

[Dave]

Gemini is helping, and to save on any disasters, new updates are going on my localhost server before coding directly on the proper site, like I was before today.

[Dave]

You can use a link from the forum index pages to go to SHROH. As the front page says, there are BBCode links that are yet to be converted. We know about those, but if you find any mistakes or things within the facts that need fixing/revising, please report them on this topic, using the SHROH ref. number from the bottom left of a casualty's page.

[Dave]

I said, "Hey Gemini, knock me up a quick OTD script." In an instant, it was ready. Seriously, I might as well just ask it to build a complete website.

[Southlancsman]

Technology!! It's the future

[Dave]

Added "On This Day We Remember" and search by surname. It wasn't very good with just the alphabet.

[Southlancsman]

Nice to see OTD back. Cheers

[Dave]

The links are in text on pages now (it is done on the client side), but clicking them (except for those that go to another casualty) will most often go nowhere and generate a "Page not found error." That looks tidier anyway.

[clareman]

Great

[Dave]

So where are we now? Where are we now?

A lot has been done. Many hours, like last time nearly 15 years ago when things were easier. I never thought that I'd be coding the platform again. I used to say to Chris, "Once it's done, its done." as he ploughed through endless hours of research. He was doing that right up until his death: a man on an unpaid mission, voluntary work without expenses. Unique he was, and he was very involved with design and presentation, even though he couldn't code a script. Each to their own, huh? He is missed. Same with Stephen Nulty, who only died last year. The three of us would go over each and every little implementation. I mean, it started because I was making a website for Ste with Chris/Le200 onboard.

Long story really, but when I was shutting everything down, mainly due to being disappointed and embarrassed by the state of how bad things had gone with the original platform code, people were saying, "You can't do that, Dave. You just can't!" And I'd start saying things like, "Well, what if I snuff it, like Chris and Ste? What happens then?" Ste was a little bit older than me, and Chris was just a few days younger.

Anyway, there was a lot of encouragement for me to update my coding skills and to start again. They were saying how its loss would leave a massive hole in local culture and be a total disaster. They'd say, "Why don't you get some crowdfunding to buy some help with the problems you are facing?" No, it wasn't going to be like that.

The same people who were screaming about the demise. Where are they now?

Let's just have a look at how many clicks there have been to the beta site. 84 in all, and I'll bet that 80 or 90 percent of those were by me. It can get you down sometimes, y'know.

Is there anything that you like about it or anything that you hate? Is anybody there?

And I've been letting the 'community' down by not getting involved in the forum topics. Can't win.

[devonboy]

Dave your doing a great job and much appreciated by me and I am sure lots of people will feel the same

[Southlancsman]

Hi Dave, are we able to add pictures yet? Just have a couple of local interest photos taken in Ypres over the last couple of days to share.

[Dave]

See my message in the SHROH site editors area.

[BRIFFA]

Hello

My great grandfather was on the original site which I am reading has sadly had to close. Will his name (and pic) that was included, eventually appear here as nothing comes up in the search at present.

Thank you for your kind assistance.

Bernie Briffa