Entry #20: 10/13 January 2025 It's a new year, and more work has been done to the site. The first revision is now up, with some formatting updates and additional content in the HARDAC section. The bulk of HARDAC is now being developed separately, in a section that will be searchable once it's complete. Aside from that, too many minor, individual changes to list here. |
Entry #20: 27 December 2024 I decided to shift some of the HARDAC contents around. I decided that I'm going to host a few sample items for each HARDAC section on the web server, and the remainder will be hosted from the file server. I also culled some listings from the Dhofarchive that didn't actually have anything to do with Oman or the Dhofar Rebellion. Additionally, I made a few updates to the Morning Review page, specifically to the Comedy and Comics section. |
Entry #19: 13 and 16 December 2024 I did some updates and quality assurance reviews on Friday, December 13th, 2024. That included some updates to the physical training page, and the book list. As it turns out, on Sunday the 15th, I ended up looking for a book in my storage bins, and confirmed that several of the books that I'd deleted from the list are apparently still part of my collection, so I'll need to do some additional work to reconcile the two. |
Entry #18: 28 November 2024 Alright, there's been a lot of development work in recent weeks, most of which hasn't been formally logged. On November 23rd and 25th, I spent a bunch of time downloading resources on the Sultanate of Oman and the Dhofar Rebellion from the Arabian Gulf Digital Archive and the DLI Foreign Language Center. Once again, I'm also restructuring the website, moving HARDAC out from the JTS, Ltd. section to form three main sections, rather than two main sections and a subsection. That drove a restructuring and expension of the frontpage, and a revision of the HARDAC and JTS, Ltd. main pages. I also built or revised the menu pages for SARA, DHARMA, HERA, and LARA, to include writing a long diatribe on the history of the DLI LSK library. |
Entry #17: 07 April 2024 I added a photo to the General Interests page in the Bruck section, and fixed an error on the Bruck main menu page. |
Entry #16: 29 November 2023 I made some modest changes to the JTS Ltd. section, and a few minor updates to the Bruck section. I also built a to-do list for completing the website. Booyakasha! |
Entry #15: 17 November 2023 I built the Bruck Reading List page, began to rebuild the Bruck Book List page (which was done, but accidentally got overwritten by the Reading List page), and moved the Morning Review and Data Sets pages (and data sets) into the main JTS, Ltd. section. I had originally expected that HARDAC would be a standalone domain, so development of the JTS, Ltd. section has spurred the re-evaluation of where some assets ought to be nested. Party on. |
Entry #14: 13 November 2023 I did a bunch of work on November 3rd, but now I can't remember exactly what it was. Today, I basically built the entire Joshua Tree Security frontpage - well, at least the HTML bits of it - and moves a couple of sections from Bruck to that section. |
Entry #13: 30 October 2023 I made minor edits to the Physical Training page, and completed substantial edits to the Shortwave Radio section of the General Interest page. |
Entry #12: 27 October 2023 I added resources to the Physical Training and Arabic section of the Morning Review. I also built the Reading List page. |
Entry #11: 23 October 2023 I consolidated and (effectively) rebuilt the General Interests page in the Bruck section. There's still some work to be done before it's actually presentable, but it's been dragged out of the old table-intensive format and rebuilt into a simplified table. I also fixed the headers throughout the site, recreated the Great War header, and created a matching Dhofarchive header. |
Entry #10: 13 October 2023 I made updates to the Morning Review page, completely rebuilt the Recipes page, and added several recipes that weren't in the prior version. |
Entry #9: 02 October 2023 I added the position description for my current position to the curriculum vitae page. I also re-wrote basically all of the Physical Training Plan page, to include making some key adjustments to my long-term physical fitness plan. |
Entry #8: 18 September 2023 Today, I made some additional updates to the curriculum vitae page, and made a couple of minor updates to the Dhofarchive and Great War front pages. |
Entry #7: 13 September 2023 Yesterday, I dug through some old files to find a couple of my old position descriptions. Today, I dropped those into my curriculum vitae page, and spent some time building additional sections. |
Entry #6: 11 September 2023 Today, I populated the template for the Great War Archive template with text. That effort is probably around 70% complete. |
Entry #5: 11 August 2023 Today, I made new templates for the six HARDAC sections, and populated the template for the Dhofarchive template with text and most of its links. At some point, I need to figure out how to make a search bar, or else index the contents and provide that. That's a long way off. |
Entry #4: 04 August 2023 Wow. I've done a lot of work on this project since 2020, and logged basically none of it. Rather than catch up on all of that logging, I'll just mention what I've done today. |
Entry #3: 16 June 2020 I added a recipe for Coronation Chicken to the Recipes page. Owing to the manner in which I've built the page, it was vastly more work than it should have been. Then, I made some additional edits to the About Me page, and tightened up a couple of things on the General Interests page. |
Entry #2: 01 November 2017 Among my other ambitions, I'd eventually like for HERA to become the Internet's most comprehensive source for resources on the Dhofar Rebellion, an insurgency that took place in southwestern Oman from around 1962 to around 1979, and primarily between 1970 and 1976. Studying and archiving material about the Dhofar Rebellion has taught me how ethereal and transient data on the Internet can be, as many resources - notably David Cuthbertson's Snap Shooting in Oman website - have either disappeared entirely, or migrated to and fro. One of the best websites about the Dhofar Rebellion was and is the 55 Field Surgical Team RAMC website. With zero intention of blatantly plagiarizing the entire thing, I wanted it - all of it - for my records. So, I downloaded HTTrack, which is a website copying utility. Honestly, I wish I'd known about this thing years ago. |
Entry #1: 25 October 2017 So, as you may have gathered, a big piece of HARDAC are my various archives - SARA, DHARMA, HERA, and LARA. They contain a lot of files. In 2009 and 2010, and again in 2011 and early 2012, I was bored at work, and I ended up assembling the early precursors to DHARMA: a "turnover binder" CD-ROM of a bunch of the resources I'd used in my job as a network security accreditation coordinator, and an archive of materials related to my job as a physical security and anti-terrorism advisor. When I made those archives, I did it the hard way: I copied, by hand, for hours on end, clicking and clicking and clicking, to copy and paste the individual filenames into HTML text files. That was really dumb. Today, I lean on Excel (or, at present, Apache OpenOffice, which is both inferior to, and vastly cheaper than, Excel) for a lot of my repetitive HTML editing, but I figured that there absolutely must be some way to get Windows to hand me a list of all of the files in my various archive directories. I was correct! I can't remember what I Googled, and I've since closed the browser tab, but I found these instructions, which yielded a handy text file. Thus far, it's been really helpful for finding stuff that shouldn't become a part of HARDAC - for example, *I* may find a legacy edition of the entire CIA World Factbook to be useful and interesting, but it's over one hundred megs, and virtually everyone will be infinitely more interested in the current version of the World Factbook. (Fun fact: around 2007, I bought a hard copy edition of the World Factbook, which they apparently publish every year. Apparently you can get the 1990 edition on your Kindle for $8.50 (or from Project Gutenberg for free and PDF it yourself), the 2006 edition for free, or just download the app.) There will still be plenty of work to do to turn that file tree into actual links so that users can find the appropriate resources, but it will turn days or weeks worth of work into hours worth of work. More to come. Stay tuned. |