rawlinson – us

Friends, Family, and WW2?

My older brother, Ed, has been playing the game Medal of Honor, Allied Assault for quite a while and at some point decided he should have a clan, or gaming team, for the game. He was an MP in the Army and is a Deputy Sheriff now so it was only natural that his clan was based around a police theme. His clan is named The 69TH MP Company. I’m not sure if there is any significance to the number 69 beyond the obvious innuendo.

The guys in the group all seem to be pretty friendly and all of them seem to be better at the game than I am. I bought it about 2 months ago but have only played it for a few days. Basically, I suck. But Ed was cool and asked me if I wanted to join the clan. The requirements for joining are military or police background so my Army experience got me past the sticky rules. Now if only my lack of skill could get me past the opponents sticky bullets.

Since I haven’t really helped the clan at all as far as gameplay is concerned I was happy to jump at the chance to help the clan where I could – their website. My brother made a good effort at the clan website but he asked for some help in getting things updated, improved, and incorporating their own forum instead of using a free service full of popups. So I built the clan a new website layout and updated most of the content. This past weekend I was able to communicate with the website service provider to get a database setup and now we have a forum courtesy of phpBB. It works pretty well for what the clan needs and has one vital element that will help me in expanding the capabilities of the site – phpbb uses group based permissions!

I will be working on a simple news application based on the phbpp security model and will then build an event calendar based on the same principals. This way Ed and his partners at the top of the guild can properly manage the contents of the match calendar and the site-wide news column. Overall I’m pretty happy with the site. Every page but the forum is built using pure CSS (no tables). The CSS broke on the forum though so I had to use a table to get the same look and feel. That was a bummer but oh well we work with what we have. It would be cool if phpBB would come out with a purely valid CSS theme but until then I have enough on my plate to do without building one myself.

Thanks for the job Ed, it was fun getting everything put together – now we just have to hope I can remain so motivated when getting the news and calendar put together!