Everything you never knew you wanted to know about the Mercury Project

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The purpose of this article is to communicate news about this web site. If you are looking for a list of newly changed and added articles see the Recent changes link in the navigation box.

Software update

I finally decided to upgrade to the latest version of mediawiki which will run on my current configuration. My apologies to anyone who tried to access it today and found the site down.

Please let me know if you run into any problems.

Posting again allowed

I just re-configured to once allow non-logged in users to edit, and new accounts to be requested.

Temporary Suspension of anonymous edits

I've temporarily suspended the ability for non-logged in users to edit the wiki. I've also temporarily suspended new accounts.

The reason for this is that I'm going to be in the hospital for the next week or so, and won't be able to monitor for wiki spam. I'm going to have bypass surgery tomorrow morning.

Although the spam filters have been working quite well of late, I just don't want to leave the site open and have to deal with spam when I get back. There haven't been very many non-spam contributions from anyone but me anyway.

I'll turn things back on when I get back home. --Rick DeNatale 21:51, 22 Jun 2006 (EDT)

Policy Decision - advertisements in posts

Recently someone used this site to advertise an "original" Mercury manual for sale on e-bay.

I'm a bit conflicted about this for the following reasons.

1. This site is intended to be a long-term repository of information about the Mercury Project, e-bay auctions are transient in nature.
2. In this particular case, the Mercury Familiarization Manuals in various editions, as well as many other NASA reports and documents, are freely available for download. The articles here on the manuals have links to where they can be obtained. I'd hate to have this site used to talk someone into buying information that they could get for free. Yes, an original copy might have some collector value, but here we are trading on information.
3. It is true that this site uses google adsense in an attempt to glean some small revenue to offset my costs, and to support the site itself. To-date this has not generated even the minimum $100 in revenue in order to raise any revenue. I've tried hard to keep the advertisements unobtrusive, and I guess I've succeeded since not many folks are clicking on the ads, hence the pitiful revenue.

So I've decided that I'm going to keep an eye out for and delete such ads when I find them, particularly from anonymous posters. If you REALLY feel you need to have such an ad link here, first register as a user, and then restrict such ads to your own user-page.

Back on the air

Last weekend I decided to 'bite the bullet' and upgrade the system which hosts this wiki. I've switched Linux distributions from Red Hat Linux 9 to Ubuntu 5.04, which is much more up to date, and based on Debian which should make future upgrades much less painful.

It took a few days to get things straightened out and figure out enough about Debian/Ubuntu configuration and how it differs from the Red Hat approach, but it seems to be working correctly now.

Please let me know if you encounter any problems. --Rick DeNatale 21:57, 13 Jul 2005 (EDT)

Pressure suit article

I've been spending a lot of time working on the pressure suit article. I've been sorting through all of the photos of Mercury suits which were already on-line, trying to identify training vs. flight photos and putting things in order. I've gotten through Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn for the most part, with Carpenter, Schirra, and Cooper are in process. The only photo of Deke suited up that I've found is the one group photo [:Image:NASA.S62-08774.jpg|S62-08774]]. --Rick DeNatale 22:52, 19 Jun 2005 (EDT)

New domain name

I've registered the domain name mercuryspacecraft.com the official url for this website is now http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com

Although the old one still works, you should probably change your bookmarks and/or links on other pages to the new name.

New main page features

I've put some work into making the main wiki page more appealing.

History blurb

Every day, the main page will display some links to items from the Mercury development chronology which are related to this date in history. If nothing happend on this date, then the last interesting date will be displayed.

Did you know

Theres a box on the main page to show interesting or quirky things I've discovered relevant to the Mercury project, I'll try to keep changing this as I find new stuff.

Navigational aids

Near the top of the main page I've added several links to major categories like People, Spacecraft, Missions, etc. These should aid in browsing the site. There's also a new Browse page and a Hierarchical list of all article categories

More help for readers and contributors

I've been adapting tutorials and help articles from the Wikipedia. From the main page you can reach:

• General help This can also be accessed from the navigation box to the left of each article. This gives help on both finding information on the site, and contributing to it.
• General introduction accessible from clicking on the "anyone can edit" link on the main page, which gives a quick introduction to editing wiki pages.
• A more extensive tutorial which gives much more information about advanced features of the site and how to use them.

In addition, the Community Portal article, always accessible in the navigation box, has information on how you might help improve the site. So far the majority of contributions to this site have come from your humble servant Rick DeNatale, and then wiki spammers. I'd love to have others contribute, and the Community Portal is a good place to start.

Lots of new images

Ever since the inception of this site, I've had a huge backlog of NASA images. I'd been gradually uploading them to the site manually, but that's been a tedious process. I recently started to learn how to use the pywikipediabot to write robot applications which can do this and other tedious jobs, like building the category hierarchy page and other things. I recently put this to work to upload all of my backlogged NASA images, resulting in more than 400 new pictures here. The robot categorized these various categories. I'm gradually incorporating these into articles as appropriate.

The fight against spam

Some frequent visitors here might occassionally run across pages full of links to (ahem) off-topic web sites.

Recently, there was a massive wikispam attack on many websites using the mediawiki software, as this site does.

In the past, I've quickly reverted these changes as soon as I noticed them and blocked the culprit from the site. Unfortunately, this last attack happened when I was on a trip and wouldn't have guaranteed internet access, so I had to turn off all posting by un-registered users, and self-registration until I returned.

Since then I've implemented more sophisticated measures which attempt to discover when someone is attempting to add links to websites which are known wikispam sites. So far this has proved effective and has prevented about five attempts to spam the site.

For more on how you can help see RixWiki:Community_Portal#Keep_the_place_looking_nice

Experiments in revenue generation

To help defray some of my costs in running this site, I've begun the experiment of adding, hopefully discreet and tasteful, ad-links. Feel free to look at any of the links which interest you, which will help the site, or ignore them or turn them off with ad-block if they really annoy you.