User talk:Ixoekea

Pathfinder Manuals

The Pathfinder Story - Pathfinder Story Book

Church Heritage Manual - Heritage Manual

Years Honors Introduced

Hi, Ixoekea, I noticed you were able to add the years of introduction to many of the honors that were missing them. Do you mind sharing where you found the information? I've been trying to find that info for a long time! Thanks! --w126jep (talk) 22:37, 13 November 2016 (UTC)'

//Hi w126jep I found them under Plusline\(Honor Search) on Adventsource. Here is an example of : Aboriginal Lore Bottom Left corner of document says 2001.
I think there may be a discrepancy for Triathlon(Advanced) AdventSource says 2001. This website says 1956. I looked in our Recreation honour hard copy 6th edition from 1998 and Triathlon is not located in the honour book.
I also sent an inquire to the Australia Division on the skill level and the years of the missing information on the Australia honours such as [Australian Birds and Land and Freshwater Mollusks] that are missing that information. We actually just finished the Australian Birds honour in our club last week. Ixoekea (talk) 01:35, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for that clarification, Ixoekea! I see that the PDFs provided by AdventSource do indeed provide that year for these honors. However, I believe what that year is referring to is the edition of the Honors Manual, not the year the honor was introduced. Whenever honor requirements are updated, the manual will include the year they were updated. Also, the edition year will be stated when an honor has now been included into the NAD manual from another Division, which is not always the same year it was introduced. I am almost certain many of these honors were created before then. If you look at the list of the ones you updated, many of them are honors that were accepted and added to the NAD manual from another division, which means that they were not necessarily introduced in that year.

Which brings me to some questions: Should the Wiki reflect the year the honor was first introduced into its division or should it list the year it was introduced to the NAD? What about honors adapted from other divisions in one year and accepted a different year into the NAD but with slight changes to the requirements (some SAD & SPD honors, such as Guitar, had their requirements modified before being accepted at GC level, and therefore NAD)? Which year should we list as introduction for those? Or is it better to just show the year the honor first came out? When I read «Year of Introduction», my immediate assumption is the year the honors first came out. Any thoughts? --w126jep (talk) 01:36, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

It's a blurry line. I wouldn't worry too much about it, since it could arguable be categorized as trivia. (But trivia is fun sometimes). --Jomegat (talk) 14:15, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi w126jep I guess I kind of got a head of myself with the information I realized that when I started looking up other honours and the dates were different. Speaking on what you were talking about. What about this idea. Or: (Original date) Rv: (Revised date?) It might give a better idea on which honours have not been updated for awhile and would be considered for updating if someone so choose to put the honour back through for a revised edition. Ixoekea (talk) 00:32, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

I like the idea. I think there would be a way to set it up with a «if x is present, then y appears» type of function. Meaning that the year of the revised edition would only show up if there exists one. That way, those honors which have not needed to be updated won't just have a blank space in the revised date section. --w126jep (talk) 01:34, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Is this something Jomegat would have to put into place? Ixoekea (talk) 01:37, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

It's something I could put in place. I suppose I should start a to-do list for myself, or I'm sure to forget. --Jomegat (talk) 04:55, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Replacing images

I noticed you were trying to replace the honor image for Pigeon Raising. I, too, often update images. If you are just updating or replacing an image, you don't have to upload a completely new one. You can take the following steps:

Click on the image. This will take you to the page where the image is filed.
Scroll down to the file history section.
Click on the link «Upload a new version of this file».
Upload the replacement file.

This way, you won't have to go and change the link to the image and worry about changing the name.

Also, whenever possible, try to upload images with a transparent background. These files are usually portable network graphics and saved with the extension «.png» instead of «.bmp» or «.jpg». This will prevent the white box or white background from showing up because the background will be transparent. --w126jep (talk) 01:49, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up! I noticed that when I updated it and than took it off. :) Sorry for all the confusion of me taking part. I'll get the hang of it shortly. Ixoekea (talk) 01:55, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Lol, don't worry, trial and error was the only way I learned too. Don't be too worried about making mistakes. Almost everything can be reverted. So keep working at it, the Wiki always needs contributors. --w126jep (talk) 03:20, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

I followed the steps with updating the patch and it keeps showing this error (File extension ".png" does not match the detected MIME type of the file (image/jpeg)). What am I doing wrong? I have tried uploading the file in .png from my computer and always .jpg and tried changing the updated file name to .png. Ixoekea (talk) 03:31, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

I got it thanks. It was the user using the computer! ;) Is there a way to delete past images? Ixoekea (talk) 03:42, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Only admins have the ability to delete pages. But if you just ask one of us, we can do it, no prob. --w126jep (talk) 04:03, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

I've got one here for you. I tried updating the patch for Subsistence Farming and it seems to be reverting back to the original file and not the new .png file I uploaded. Are you able to help me out and explain what I'm doing wrong??? Thanks for all the help w126jep Ixoekea (talk) 04:35, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

You aren't doing anything wrong. Most of the time, when you upload a new image, it will not display the new image right away. This is probably what you're seeing. As long as it says the image was uploaded, you're fine. You can always check back the next day and for sure the new image will begin to display.--w126jep (talk) 12:38, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the help! Ixoekea (talk) 21:18, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

A lot of times the reason you see old images instead of new ones is because your browser is caching them. Most browsers will allow you to clear the cache. Firefox used to reload everything if you pressed ctrl-R, but I don't know if that's still the case, or if other browsers do the same thing. It's easy enough to try though. --Jomegat (talk) 06:06, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Transparent backgrounds

Hi Ixoekea,

Would you like to take a crack at making the backgrounds to the new insignia you uploaded transparent? I could give it a go, but it might be a while before I can get around to it. --Jomegat (talk) 05:00, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi Jomegat,

Sure I would love to, Wep126jep was saying to save the files into .png. But I noticed they did not upload into a transparent file. I'm assuming I'll need to use photoshop to edit the files and than upload? But I noticed the .png's that I uploaded to replace Subsitence Farming and Pigeon Raising reverted back to the default images and won't load the new ones. Any issue if I work on creating a page for the Master Guide program? Just for the questions that are involved in it? Ixoekea (talk) 05:04, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Hey guys Wep126jep Jomegat

I've updated all the Insignia for Other that I can find. I'll wait the couple days for it to upload to make sure its correct. How does one go about creating a page? This might be an idea to broaden the requirements for the Other Pins and Awards for each award. I think the only 4 we can broaden on is the NAD, Silver, Gold, Master Guide Awards.

I also uploaded all new insignia for AY Honors/Outdoor Industries.

AY Honors/Health and Science are updated. The only ones I could not find updates for are "Mental Health, Human Sexuality, First Aid Advanced and Oral Hygiene""

AY Honors/Household Arts is all updated except for the Advanced Honors.

Finally I got them working :D

Ixoekea (talk) 03:32, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Mental Health, Oral Hygiene, etc. are all honors available only in the South American Division (SAD). The only images I've been able to find are the ones in the SAD Honors Manual, which are not actual images of the patch. The SAD online store that sells their patches does not take pictures of the patches and uploads them like AdventSource does. So to get actual photos , we would have to wait for Oshkosh, meet some Pathfinders from the SAD, and hope they have actually completed those honors so that we might ask to take pictures. Or we could fly down to Brazil or Chile and get them. Lol, so don't worry too much about finding those. --w126jep (talk) 13:38, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Looks like you got the transparent stuff working. When we got the artwork from AdventSource, they all has opaque backgrounds, and I went through all of them with Gimp. But if you have Photoshop, more power to you.

To create a page, all you have to do is create a link to it and then click on it. Then add material. W126jep and I can fix up any syntax issues, but it would be good if you would look at the source and see what we change. Actually, that's a good way to learn the wiki syntax - look at the source for anything similar to what you want to do and try to figure it out from there. You can create experimental pages under your user page or in the Sandbox. It might be a good idea to figure out the page structure before you start creating pages, but it's not hard to move them afterwards. Rearranging gets messy after you have a lot of things linking to it though, so it's a good idea to start with a solid plan. I suggest a top level page for Master Guide, and then put a level or two of pages beneath that (but I would not go more than three levels deep). --Jomegat (talk) 06:04, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Jomegat,

Yes I was using a Photoshop editor to change the transparency. I found it worked the best and probably the quickest. Sounds good about the Master guide page. There are 7 topics for the Master Guide. So it might be best separating them by Topic just like the classwork for the Investiture Achievement's. That's one thing I did I found the syntax of the retired honours and used that to put the "Others" in. Ixoekea (talk) 06:35, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Jomegat, I'm finding this fairly easy. It's very similar to coding C++, Java, or html. I've done the basics for that. It just takes time :D Ixoekea (talk) 02:48, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Questions

Hi Ixoekea, I moved your questions to the Discussion page because I think it would be beneficial for anyone else that has these questions or might have other answers. --w126jep (talk) 20:52, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Hey w126jep, Jomegat.

Just got back from my vacation out East. Where can I help out?

--Ixoekea (talk) 03:28, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

I've been preparing some of the pages to use the DPL cache (DPL is the Dynamic Page List extension, and is what we use to make the honor indices (see Template:Honor index). I believe that DPL is probably more responsible for the site's sluggishness than any other single factor, so I am looking to tweak it. The caveat is that any page that has more than one instance of the honor index template (or really... uses more than one dpl tag), has to specify a cachename. I made a copy of "honor index" at Template:Honor_index2 and added the caching statement to it (i.e., a "dplcache= parameter to the dpl parser). It can't divine the name of the cached page by itself, so the user has to pass one in (cachename). If the user doesn't supply one, it just uses "1" as the cache name. As part of the experiment, I've changed the Health and Science page to use the second template (with caching). I would like to have some quantifiable data to know if it's helping though. Can you think of a way to get that? Maybe time page loads? I dunno. Anyhow, if you could look at what I've done and offer opinions, that would be helpful too. --Jomegat (talk) 02:32, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

Question. What about automatically resetting the DPL Query after it reaches a certain amount? If the Query is reset back at 0 would if make things load in faster? Did some reading online and it seems that DPL has a maximum for the caches to load and then it becomes slower. or what about ?action=purge? purging at the end of a url to reset it? Other options might be to use static's, phantoms or switches.--Ixoekea (talk) 03:51, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

Purging basically ignores the cached data and makes the server recompute the page list. It would essentially undo the caching (and thus, undo the benefit of the cache). --Jomegat (talk) 05:06, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

It was worth a thought.

So I've been building a Pathfinder Application that is going to be updated for Android devices. Currently it has the Pledge, Law, Aim, and Motto, Song(lyrics and mp3) and I am almost done the Arts and Crafts. Hopefully it will have the investiture achievements on it. I have Alpha tested it on Andorid Tablets and Phones and Windows computers and it has been successful. The application runs offline, so there is no need for internet to have it in the palm of the hand. It only has the patch and the questions for the honours. --Ixoekea (talk) 01:37, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

That sounds pretty awesome!