User talk:Chris5156

Ringways & maps

Have you come up with a way of using maps for Ringways References? Do you want scans uploading here, or whatever information can be given? Steven 20:44, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

No, I haven't come up with anything, and if I said I'd been actively thinking about it I'd be lying :) I have no objection to uploading map scans if you want to go that way - I think really I was just imagining the creation of a page for each map we need to reference that would list the useful information it contains, and the publisher, year and so on, rather like we list files at archives.

There's no reason at all not to put extracts online if it helps us reference our sources though! We could always try one or two and see how it looks. --chris5156 21:33, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Requests for the Manchester Awayday

Oooh flippin' heck, there's activity on this site :-O

Anyway, I intend to pop up to TNA some time before the next awayday in a few weeks and pull out anything that's relevant (such as the newspaper clippings of the M50's construction and opening I took to Ross on Wye, not that anyone except me bothered to look at them).

Any ideas? I was thinking of something to do with the original M62 and the East Lancs Road but my TNA search-fu is not up to par this morning. --Ritchie333 11:26, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Activity? Yes, it gets busy once a year or so! I've been doing some tidying up to Artefacts and integrating it with our personal pages. Makes a lot more sense now.

I'm hoping to get to TNA on Thursday - would have been Monday but they're closed Mondays now, which is less than helpful. If we're shopping for things to bring, I'll bring along (perhaps see if I can print?) my camera copy of MT 119/116. It shows construction plans for the original bit of M62, but not entirely as-built. There's a layout for a "future" junction where the Carrington Spur now is, which is shown as a full trumpet interchange, and a strangely-configured roundabout interchange with the A580. I can certainly bring that.

I'm not sure I'll have time to do any special M62 research, but if you do, Chris's shopping list includes "MT 95/248 and MT 95/249 - Barton Bridge special road and plans 1956-63". If you want to dig out some M62 stuff I'd start there.

I think most East Lancs Road stuff will be in Preston, because it was pre-trunk roads and would have been a local authority scheme. Should be some MoT papers discussing funding and that sort of thing but it'll be more hit and miss.--chris5156 17:13, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Ah, you lot in the south east, and your namby-pamby "it takes me 10 minutes to get to TNA" ways... Bring something cool that I'll like to sunny Lancashire is all I ask... If you're nice to me, I might bring my BUM stuff along! ;-) Steven 02:19, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Shopping list

Just to let you know, I've looked at a few files on your shopping list - check the "recent changes" to see what. --Ritchie333 20:06, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

National Archives cat links

I've added some pages today, but I think the National Archives catalogue link numbers are all wrong. Since TNA moved over to using the new Discovery interface, I can't obviously find where the right ID is - I picked what looked to be the right thing off the address bar, and it's not. Can you advise? Ritchie333 (talk) 14:05, 22 March 2014 (CDT)

Yes, it's a problem. I've noticed it but I don't have a solution yet! I wonder if the better thing to do is find out whether you can call up a file on TNA's catalogue by encoding the file reference in the URL - that way, instead of manually changing all the files, I can just rewrite the header template to generate a new link from the page title. I'll have to see. --chris5156 (talk) 08:50, 23 March 2014 (CDT)

Update: I've now fixed this to do exactly what I just suggested. The template now passes the file reference to a little PHP script I wrote which runs a search for you on the Discovery catalogue. "nacatref" in Template:Header is no longer used. --chris5156 (talk) 09:58, 23 March 2014 (CDT)

Excellent - cheers! Ritchie333 (talk) 09:41, 1 April 2014 (CDT)

My last answer was, in some ways, wrong - the "nacatref" property is still used, but only in the sense that you have to put something in it so that the link is generated. If the property is empty it won't auto-generate a link. This is because the header template is also used for non-National Archives files, so without this it would be attempting to create TNA catalogue links for files at other sites too. Since the change I've just been putting "Y" next to "nacatref".--chris5156 (talk) 12:53, 3 April 2014 (CDT)