I posted a Summit Information Article for W3/PD-033. It makes me cringe to look at it currently, but I don’t know how to fix the formatting. Is there a way?
And while it is not an exceptionally scenic Summit, I do have some informational photo’s. But I have no idea how to share them.
Any tips welcome.
Glenn AB3TQ
Hi Glenn,
Yes, the formatting is apparently stripped out of the content, however you enter it.
I find it best to post a link to another site, where you can format the info and include track maps or GPX files etc.
A lot of vk activators have started up blogs using Wordpress.com (free web publishing) and you can put all your info there very readily. It is easy to use. After publishing, grab the URL of your article about a specific summit and post that as a link on the summit info page.
73
Andrew vk1da/2uh
The notes section is really very old software, getting on for 10 years old and things have moved on a lot since then. Me, I would post the fully formatted article here and post a link to that in the summits notes section along with a precis of the route. Or you can post the formatted article on a blog site and post a link. If you don’t have a blog, then posting here is as good as anywhere.
As expected, I received a quick responses telling me what I needed to know about posting civilized looking text formatting. Since I have no Blog or personal web space, posting my Activation Account here is my only current option.
I have some photo’s to accompany the text as well. It’s almost embarrassing how trivial an effort is needed to activate my 4 closest Summits combined, compared to some of the spectacular Activations documented here. But this is where I live, and the photos document that. Hopefully it can even convince some local limited mobility operators that not all Summits are beyond their reach…
So I looked into adding one test photo from the Activation to this existing post, to see how the process works. Of course the one photo I chose exceeds the 3072 KB site limit. A quick check indicates about 40% of my photos are a bit size excessive, but not by that much. The worst one is 3.5 MB. These are still exactly as taken by a simple digital camera that will fit in a front pants pocket. It was set to the highest file size setting, and I could always cut that back.
Several years back I did have a need to limit the file size of photo’s. I am sure I can track down that software again, but I do wonder how long it has been since the file size limit here has been reviewed for relevance. I assume the limit was not chosen on a simple whim, but is it still the best necessary choice?
I do see many magnificent photos here that obviously have managed to get below that limit, so this really is only a Photos By Dummies issue, and I am one. And I could use all the help I can get.
But if you say 3072 is still the best choice here, I will figure it out.
Glenn AB3TQ
Glenn – pretty much any photo editing program, and likely the free ones already on your PC, will take care of re-sizing your photos. Meaning it will read in the full resolution as taken by the camera and allow you to save a new version with fewer pixels and a smaller file size. For just viewing on screen you really don’t need a super hi resolution file.
Scott/K7ZO
GIMP is a good, free graphics editing program. It works on Windows and Linux. I’ve been using it for resizing and contrast adjustments for the last 10 years.
I use Irfanview - also free.
For a photo to display on a computer screen that cannot display more than 1920 pixels across, there is no need to have 4000 pixels. 800 x 600 is quite big enough for most purposes. Some use 1024 x 768, for 4:3 aspect ratios. Numbers will vary for widescreen formats (16:9).
After a bit of practice you will become quite adept at reducing photos to sensible sizes for use on the web.
Easiest is to just upload your photos to Flickr (other photo sharing sites are available).
You can then just add the link directly here, like this, no need to worry about size as they’re hosted elsewhere! -
20150720_100523 by Peter, on Flickr
or pick whatever other size takes your fancy!
Bredon Hill - G/CE-003 by Peter, on Flickr
20150625_052047 by Peter, on Flickr
You can share them at the same time in the SOTA Flickr group!
Just a quickly. Don’t want to hijack the thread but what is that small computer tablet console looking thing in your pic peter in your first pic?
Andy has pointed to the original thread.
The device is the Open Pandora
They are not easy to find however!
I was quite fortunate in getting mine.
HTH
Pete
Since Andy has been using GIMP for 10 years, that is a quite good recommendation. But the mention of Irfanview made me remember that was the free software I had used long ago, and mostly forgotten. Might as well try what I had used a bit in the past. It seems they released an update just a few days ago, and I downloaded it.
It was nearly automatic for such a basic task (no actual photo editing), and I have now posted that test photo. Making a little progress with a lot of help. Thanks.
This thread has been quite helpful to allow me to share my acquired knowledge of Summit Access for my few successful SOTA adventures. Seems like a good place to ask a related question. And I do hope to actually see a follow up activation someday that was encouraged, or at least aided by any of my articles.
I am NOT a blog person. I have been depositing my kernels of knowledge on the Reflector. I see some fantastic blog material via the Reflector, but what happens to all that stuff when someone stops maintaining or paying for the hosting site. Gone in a puff of smoke? It would be a shame to lose all that history, but that is what I fear.
There is a plan in the works this weekend to activate W3/PH-001. My first attention cast upon a previously activated summit. But this is a special location to me (the classic location - NOT the new I am afraid of Rattlesnakes database location). I suspect I have a LOT more (and earlier) history here than the 3 time activator. I just was not yet licensed ten plus years ago, and obviously had never heard of SOTA.
My curiosity Is this: Is it appropriate to ask for that broken eternal link to be removed from that Camp Blue Mtn South W3/PH-001 summit page? And it is only a matter of time till I then turn my attention to Dan’s Pulpit W3/PH-002 that has the same broken link.
How long must a link be dead before it is worthless?
Glenn AB3TQ
OK, what a coincidence. New information just hours after my previous post. I happened to see and investigate an Alert for later this morning at W1/HA-073. And there is another familiar looking link: The Appalachian Trail goes over the summit (Submitted by N2YTF on 27 Apr 2010)
The surprising difference? This link works, and seems to be just the statement that this summit is located on the route designated The Appalachian Trail. Really I now see this is probably supposed to be nothing more than a simple FYI, which is fine.
The broken links posted at the same time by the same callsign are instead designated as an “External Link”. The working link is not designated as such. Is this something that N2YTF did differently 5 years ago, or more recently?
And I point out that the route for the Appalachian Trail is not fixed. It can change over time, so that an FYI designation which was correct when it was posted years ago is not guaranteed to be correct tomorrow. Unless a Manager decides to move the coordinates back on to the re-routed AT instead of for the actual Summit (not a hypothetical situation - It happened). Why? This is not AT On The Air.
One of the comments, the one that works, has the data saved on the Sotawatch web site. The one that doesn’t work is a link, a pointer, to another website. That other website is no longer working or setup the way it was when the link was saved.
That is one of the problems with posting links, sometime later someone comes along and finds the link is broekn and there is often no way to fix the link. The advantage is that you can often do a lot more at the linked website. The summits info feature on Sotawatch dates back many years, probably 10 years, and has very limited facilities. Things have moved on a lot since then, we have more users that we ever imagined and web technology continues to advance. The result is that the page is a bit clunky to use.
