Talk:1st Ohio Heavy Artillery

Feedback [5 July 2009]

Nice idea. A suggestion:

I would guess that you have a lot of regimental information, histories of the unit, perhaps summaries of their role in various battles, bibliographies, background about the loales the unit drew from, etc. You may find that much of that content will need to go into separate articles. You already have several items like this, such as the background explanation and the list of Rosters. You'll probably have many more before you get done. It would be a good idea to find some way so that folks will immediately recognize that they are looking at a "Ist Ohio Heavy Artillery" page, no matter how they happened to come to it. A distinctive banner works well for this---an image that is quickly identifiable, and has some pertinence to the subject matter of the project. In this case, a Civil war battle scene featuring heavy artillery units would work well. Banners of this sort are relatively easy to make by cutting down historic paintings to feature just the portions of interest. One could also do something nice with static images of civil war era drums, battleflags, and artillery pieces. There are lots of source materials to draw upon. I'd be happy to lend a hand with this if you wish.

Examples of pages using banners include:

Southwest Virginia Project

Early Settlers of Augusta County, Virginia but see also Old Augusta Trial Page

Coleman Family Exchange

If you expect this to get very detailed you may need to adopt a coherent navigation scheme that will allow folks to a) get back to your main page, and b) navigate to other parts of the project of interest to them. Its easier to set up such a scheme at the beginning, rather than trying to back fit it into already established pages. There are several ways to do this, but this page Early Settlers of Old Augusta in DeliJim's Old Augusta Project shows an test of a graphic navigation package. The intent is that the string of "icons" would appear on every main subpage page of the project. That way you can get back to other components with out having to go through the main page.

Q 09:15, 5 July 2009 (EDT)

Thank you so much for the feedback! I really do appreciate it. Your Southwest Virginia Project inspired this quite a bit. I think you're right about getting a graphic banner together for the main pages. I don't know if I want a huge banner on the Person pages; maybe a scaled-down version with textual links for the sub-pages instead. I'll have to think about that. --Ajcrow 09:35, 5 July 2009 (EDT)

One of the problems with putting a banner on the person pages is that some folks were in different areas at different times. If both areas start to develop projects (e.g., this happens quite a bit with persons in SWVP and the Old Augusta Projects), which banner gets used? An alternative I've thought of is using something more "badgelike" on the person pages. Then, if need be, you could place multiple badges on the same page. Or in your case, just use the badge because it would be more discrete. A regimental flag might work well as the basis for a badge. Q 09:49, 5 July 2009 (EDT)

Navigation [5 July 2009]

I see where you've added quite a few person pages for the roster already. I looked a couple over and found there was no convenient way to get back to the home page. You can go through "what links here" but you probably need something more straightforward like the "return to Company A" link on the roster page. This is where the banner comes in handy--or perhaps a badge if you wish it to be more discrete. The way I do it is to place the image for the banner/badge in a template, then include a return link to where-ever. That way you can be assured of putting the samething into every page. And if you decide you want something different, you only have to change the template, and everything automatically updates. But I wouldn't get to far along the way of adding content before you solve this problem; its a lot easier to solve the problem now when there's not much to change, than to solve it later when every page has to be revisted. Q 11:35, 5 July 2009 (EDT)

All of the Person pages have a link to the 1st Ohio Heavy Artillery page. Starting with Person:Samuel Cool (1), there is also a link to 1st Ohio Heavy Artillery, Company A. Both are in the first line of the "Civil War Service" section. Some sort of graphic linking back to 1st Ohio Heavy Artillery would probably be a good addition if it isn't too obtrusive. (I tend to go for a simpler layout.)

I don't think I'm going to do any more linking right now. I need to let this set for awhile so I can come back to it fresh and have a better idea how I want the layout. I really do appreciate all your help with this! --Ajcrow 11:44, 5 July 2009 (EDT)

Yes, I tend to go for the overly complex I suppose. I guess I just like the look of a page with some nice grpahic elements on it. At anyrate, here's an idea for a badge, based on what I gather is the Battle Flag of the First Ohio Heavy Artillery. Let me know if there's anything I can help you with.

Actually, that's the state flag of Ohio :-) Ohio is the only state with a burgee or swallowtail shaped flag. (We just had to be different <g>). The 1st OHA did have colors; the Ohio Historical Society digitized the flag (seen here [[1]], but their copyright prevents me from using their image. However, I designed a graphic based on the original flag. I think it might work to build a template around.
==Civil War Service== Source: ^S1 --Ajcrow 13:27, 5 July 2009 (EDT)

Well heck! An't trust Wikipedia fer nottin. In truth, they didn't SAY it was the battleflag---just used it as an emblem in the article. Q 17:00, 5 July 2009 (EDT)

References [5 July 2009]

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by " I remember seeing somewhere that somebody figured out a way to have footnotes within the text." I presume you want to insert a reference with a footnote at the bottom of the page? That's fairly straight forward <ref name="Something">text of footnote</ref> needs to be inserted in the appropriate point of the main text. Then <reference/> goes elsewhere on the page where you want the footnotes to appear.

But perhaps you are looking for something more complicated, like streaming the "footnote" within the main text or something? Q 09:21, 5 July 2009 (EDT)

I must be doing something wrong with the code. Could you point me toward a page that uses it? (I knew I should have marked it down the other day when I came across it ;-) Thanks. --Ajcrow 09:32, 5 July 2009 (EDT)

Sure, but here's a better solution ^[1] See Below for expression of footnote. the coding is, I think, a little odd. The terminal slash on "references" seems out of place to me, but that's the way it needs to be to work.

I see what I was doing wrong. I tried it on Person:Jeremiah Crabtree (1), but I don't think it's intuitive how the reference fits. What do you think about how I formatted Person:Francis Crawford (6)? It doesn't use the footnote, but I think it is more clear what the source of the military service info is. --Ajcrow 10:13, 5 July 2009 (EDT)

Footnotes

1. ↑ This is an example of the use of a reference/footnote