new resources

[PMarione]

http://shipindex.org/

[PMarione]

http://www.threedecks.org/

An interesting website but probably too ambitious : in a quick check I have noted many mistakes.

Also some problems with the search engine.

Certainly a good place to start for its great amount of info but to carefully crosscheck.

@+P

[cy]

Patrick

Yep it's ambitious, but if you aim too low you might as well not bother, and yes there are error's (transcription or from data sources).

I hope that over time the web community of naval historians will be able to provide feedback and proof reading to turn this into a really useful resource.

If you have any specific errors in mind, please let me know at cy@threedecks.org and I'll see about correcting them.

Cy

[PMarione]

@ cy

You're right to be ambitious but I would have only started with one country.

Your website is certainly a very good start for a research on a ship or some people.

When I fall on some error I'll certainly let you know (not on ships it's not my cup of tea) - HRH George Martin may be a royal bastard ?

In the search when you try to focus on a specific period you get the complete list. A php query glitch I suppose.
I have also had two officers with their careers mixed and so he was a commissioner of the Admiralty long before entering the RN, but I can't remember the name (one of those cursed homonymes).

For the French ship you have trouble with the accents (French is a pain in the arse language) and in French the definite article (le, la..) is part of the name. So we say "le Duguay-Trouin" or "la Poulette" which is again a pain in the arse to sort the names : you have to define a field for the article and one for the name. We have the same problem with street names we say "rue de la Paix" which don't sort well while in English (or Flemish) it's "Trafalgar Square" which sort correctly.
To simplify, in French some ships are male "le Vanneau" and some are female "la Résistance".

If you send me an Excel file (out list) with the French names I can quickly check for the accents and the genders.

@+P

[PMarione]

and here is another one by Teemu Koivumäki:

http://koti.mbnet.fi/felipe/index.html

[cy]

Patrick

Thanks for the offer.

I'm aware of the issue with French definate articles, and the database allows for them as a prefix field as you suggest. I just haven't got around to adding them all yet. The main problem is with Russian and some Scandinavian names with characters which are not in the standard Latin collation, so I'm currently looking at changing the whole lot (DB and pages) to utf to get round that; wish I'ld decided that a couple of years ago when I started

As for accents again I am slowly getting them corrected, but most of the French data came from spreadsheets supplied by various people, Teemu who's site you've just listed and John Tredea. Unfortunately these were mostly written using standard English without the accents.

The date bug was fixed a couple of weeks ago, but thanks for pointing it out.

We''ll get there eventually.

Cy

[PMarione]

UTF8 is certainly the right solution but you'll have to buy a lot of keyboards .

Continue with your good job.

@+P