Remember LWCollectibles?

[Roger Gaemperle]

Hello,

Some of you may remember my blog lwcollectibles.blogspot.com which I used to update almost on a daily basis in 2007. Although it had many regular visitors I thought that while it was an interesting concept it had several shortcomings:

1. Content could be created by one person only (the blog-owner)
2. The only way how content was structured was via tags
3. Due to the lack of a discussion forum or more sophisticated method to comment posts there was no much interaction among visitors

In the meantime I have been working on a much improved concept with the following features:

1. Everybody can register and upload photos & content
2. Content is structured in galleries with search & sort features
3. Each member has his/her own gallery
4. You can rate each photo or content
5. You can comment each photo or content and you can receive - if you like - automatic notification mails if somebody replies to your comment

The idea is to offer people interested in Luftwaffe (or military history in general) a structured place where they can show photos, comment & rate posts and discuss & share knowledge with others. It is very much like the well-known Flickr but dedicated to military history only and with improved categorization of content.

The website is 99% complete and naturally there is not much content yet. But you will see how the concept is supposed to work based on the content that is online already. "99% complete" because I have to resolve one final issue about uploading photos within an article (i.e. inline photos) that does not work properly yet.

With this post I want first to inform you about this concept and second to ask you for feedback, be it positive or negative.

I have built the site in my spare time and spent lots of hours. It is not set-up as a commercial website whatsoever and I don't plan to add ads nor do I intend to ask a fee for using the website. But with your feedback I may be able to improve and adjust the concept in the future.

I know there are already a number of well-known military history discussion forums and you may ask yourself why another website about military history. The answer is that my website is not supposed to replace a forum like TOCH but rather to offer something else/new (the photo gallery) to historians. I don't know a similar existing website dedicated to military history that offers this and hence I built my own.

Oh, I forgot to mention the name of the website. It is

www.battlegroundrelics.com

You can find more information about the concept here: www.battlegroundrelics.com/faq

Last but not least, I may resume posting links to interesting ebay auctions like I did before at lwcollectibles now at

http://battlegroundrelics.com/forums.../ebay-auctions

Please also let me know if there is a need to do that at all. It takes quite a lot of time and since EdWest is doing such a great job already there may be no need for that anymore.

Contrary to lwcollectibles.blogspot.com I would only post links and not scans of the auctions. This in order to respect the ownership of the buyers who often spend a lot of money and who often use these photos for their publications. They wouldn't be glad to see their photos published in the www for free (even at low resolution and with a copyright text over it). That said, in the future I will only post photos at www.battlegroundrelics.com of which I either have the originals or for which I got permissions from the owner.

Kind regards
Roger