I'm currently adding as many countries to the groups as I can.

The object of these groups is to discuss the military aspects of a country. This includes adding bookmarks, files, albums etc though albums should only be albums covering a wide variety of vehicles - specific vehicles should still go into the vehicle groups and linked to from the bookmarks.

If you want to take over a specific country group then just volunteer!

Once upon a time we used to cater a lot for the military history buffs and they are starting to come back to the web site so I am currently expanding in that direction once again. Its helped, of course, by the fact that i still have all the old military history pages so its just a case of updating them and that is in progress in Database > War Zone or through  Tools > Groups > categories > War.

I am also expanding the Country groups as I expected visitors to set them up themselves but many people seem a bit afraid to create a group but are okay with adding something to a group so expanding we are.

If you would like to become the moderator of any group and it really doesn't involve any great work then let me know and I will transfer ownership to you. All you need do is put something in the blog occasionally and add the odd bookmark, file, album etc. Remmeber to let your web friends know you are running it and ivite them to join.

People sometimes wonder why pages are 'out of date' or 'a different style to the rest'. Well its mainly because of the size of the site. At the last check we some 227,000 files in 43,000 different equipment folders and some of them haven't (literally) been checked for years. Methodically going through every page could literally take years so, apart from odd checking spurts at random, its purely a case of updating them when they are pointed out or someone wants to look at latest information.

I don't normally promote JED on the internet because I like to keep the visitor numbers down but maybe I should? I was looking at one of these keyword search sites and was surprised to discover that there were more than 2.9m links on the internet to JED...

This, of course, would bring traffic problems. But it would also bring an increase in postings on the site... swings & roundabouts I suppose.

But anyway what is your opinion?

It appears that some browsers are having diffficulty with the forums... too many JS scripts running on one page and or unable to post on a forum usually being the case. I am in the process of removing individual forums from the bottom of the series pages and changing them to a link in the sidebar of the page they are on. This will make them compatible with every type of browser.

The visitors to this site are a wide and varied bunch.. for instance there is a gentleman who regularly writes to me and corrects my use of the english language on the pages. Most people would find this irritating but I don't purely because he is helping to improve the site in his own way. Another regular is an obviously young person who writes in now & again and tells me that there is/was no such country as Czechoslovakia and that its always been the Czech republic & Slovakia. That sort of thing may be slightly irritating but purely because his school is obviously skipping important periods from his countries past.

But the bulk of people who actually do contribute stuff to this site are nice friendly people who always have a positive attitude and are always chatty.

Its the lurkers that never contribute anything that worry me I mean to say how much effort does it take just to open up their Blog facility (Tools > Blog) and post a few words or even comment on something posted on the site? Just a little something can move you from being a grey faceless drone in the background into the real live human being class....

OKay we are now accepting nominations for the CoY. Once I have all the nominations in I will put up the top three in a poll and you can vote on who is the winner.

The winners prize this year is a digital camera... second & third get my heartiest congratulations.

Nominate using the internal mail or by amking a comment on the various postings about this.

Okay those forums that lurk at the bottom of pages should be working (in a fashion) now so please try to post something relevent on one of them to try it out. You should be automatically logged into them but if you aren't just login with you normal username & password combination and you should be logged in forever.

There is also a full list of forums available under the Tools menu - it is called 'Vanilla Forum' or (when I get round to it) 'Forums'

Enjoy and tell me what happens...

Someone asked me if this was my job. Well yes in a way i suppose it is as I am on here most days doing something to the site. Of course I get breaks but its mostly for temporary jobs to earn a little extra cash and pay the bills. I still do talks to various 'organisations' about AFV Recognition training,  proof-read books/articles, ghost-write the odd article as well as the odd jaunt to do stuff for my radio show but thats basically it!

Financial donations to the site are at an all-time low probably due to the recession and that just gives me another excuse to mutter bad words about banks.

So its probably best not to go on about financial donations. But I will mention material contributions like text. images, links etc which everyone is supposed to provide but which around 80% of site members totally ignore - Its not fair on the faithful few who do provide stuff so I am going to start banning people who don't actually make any contribution I think.

Comments anyone?

I'm pretty much an iPhone freak though I don't actually own any Apple computers. This is probably why there is an iPhone version of the web site and a JED app available in the iTunes store. The app itself is about to go to version 2 so you might like to wait a few days before actually downloading it. I say a few days despite the fact that its usually a few weeks before its approved usually as I have a few subscribers at Apple and that seems to speed things along a little. When the app was originally sent for approval it received it in two days - normal time 3 weeks apparently...

Of course all this means that for many of the pages I now have to do two versions which was a pain at the start but now I have it down to a fine art and I am assured that Apples latest creation the iPad will use the normal web site pages okay so I don't have to get creative again!

BTW if your sat there wondering if other mobile phone users get a version - I'm working on it!

One more big change to the site is that the static image libraries will disappear and they will be replaced by a lightbox arrangement. Here is an early preview of it in action;

http://www.jedsite.info/afv-alpha/alpha/ab40_series/ab41/ab41.html

I'm not sure how this is going to go down with you as 99% of subscribers never bother to comment on anything so its a case of suck-it-and-see