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Hey Patriot turners! We are looking for members to shine the spotlight on for "Wednesday's Wisdom". Upload your turning projects to our Patriot Gallery so we can give you a "high five" and a pat on the back. It doesn't matter if you are a beginner or a pro, we want to give you recognition for your efforts. So, what are you waiting for? Upload those images today!!!!!!!!!!!!

What's on your work bench? This is the official topic for images and friendly chatter regarding that all important surface, the personal statement of your shop, the steadfast friend we can always count on, the space of your shop that nobody knows better than you, we are talking about the almighty "Work Bench". Submit your images now! That's right, don't clean it up, don't be embarrassed, the messier the better, or if there is nothing on it at all, that is fine too. If you have not touched your bench in years, and you have taken a break from woodworking and have boxes piled on it, we want that image too! All images are welcome. Spirit of Topic This is a Hit-n-Run topic, as you walk past your bench, whip out your camera or smart phone, and snap a shot, load it up here. No need for text explanations if you don't want too. To kick this off, walk out in your shop and snap a picture of your bench surface now, and lets get this topic rolling. This will be an ongoing topic, for you to share images of your bench top today, and every day. Types of benches Some of us have small benches, some of us have big benches, some of us use a space in our dining room, some may have a picnic table they use for a bench, and some of us may have a bench of all benches, the traditional joiners bench, or a beautiful full cabinet shakers bench. No matter what you call your work surface, no matter what your work surface looks like, we want to see images of your bench! Thank you in advance to the participants!

Web images of shapes for turned objects http://www.ipet.gr/~akoutsou/benchmark/dataset/single-all.jpg

Steve, Charlie, and Jiggy. Great job guys!!!!!!! I love them all!!

I would like to get some feedback from all of you on this subject. We have the ability to insert images via url linking. At this time we can click on "Insert other media" and click on "Insert image from URL" as seen in the below screen capture. This is a great and convenient tool especially if you host your images within services such as Flickr or Photobucket. This allows you total control over your images, and it's convenient and easy to do. But, herein lies the problem, and the threat to the integrity of our files and images within topics and posts in our community. When an image is inserted into our community using the url feature, if that image is moved, or deleted at the original location, then it is no longer view-able here in our community. While going through older topics, and while moving topics up from the archives to our live forums, I have had to delete dozens of topics, very valuable and in-depth topics because the images are no longer in the topic, because the image location has been altered at the originating end, or the images have been deleted all together in the Flickr or Photobucket account from whence the image came from. The same is true for images hot-linked (hot-linking is not a good thing to do from websites if you do not have permission to do so) from other websites. We can at this point insert image via url by simply right clicking on any image on the web, and then using the "copy image location" feature in your browser, and then inserting the image here in our community. I have used this feature too. It is very convenient when I am sharing images from our sponsors or advertisements from them as well. But, nothing last forever, and frequently those images at the original location eventually could be moved, or deleted altogether. And we are left with a topic that does not make sense, because the supporting image(s) is gone. Solutions We could eliminate the feature altogether. We could educate our contributors as they come aboard of the negative impact of this process (time consuming on my end to have to brief everyone on this for the life duration of our community) Contributors must be sure that the images they are bringing in via url will never move from their original location. The above are just a few of the suggestions, I hope you can come up with more solutions to this problem. If you'd like, you can experiment within this topic the effects of inserting images from your offsite photo-sharing accounts, go ahead and insert your image via url, then delete the image at your account, then see the effects of that process here. Please keep in mind, I do delete topics in our forums where the image(s) are missing. I have come across some of my own topics where I used the insert image via url feature, and the images are missing, and I must delete the topic. I am making a promise to myself and our community, starting now, I will download any image I want to use from another source, to my desktop, and upload it here for use in a topic, and of course when it comes to my own images of my own work and experiences, I will upload those as well. That way they will be in the topic for the duration of history. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated on this very important subject (the preservation and integrity of our topics and posts is one of the most important goals on The Patriot Woodworker)

So I'm sitting here in my truck having lunch. And across the street from where we are parked is a job going on, I think about 600 homes going in, the graders are moving dirt and having fun. And I thought how cool would it be to have a gallery reserved for "Off the Street" photographs from our smart phones and such. This would be a hit and run gallery where we can all snap an image of whatever we see that we want to share here, and load up to the gallery. Your walking down the street and you see a cool looking Totem pole, take a shot, load it up! A cool looking old Chuck Wagon, take a shot load it up! Yourself! Take a shot, load it up! You get the point. What say you all?

Dear folks, we had a wonderful discussion on images submitted by you, and how they are used here on The Patriot Woodworker in another un-related topic at I thought I would open up a designated topic for this area of concern and we can hash it all out here. I'd like to open this up by stating, I/we completely understand the concerns. And we are open to all suggestions as you all know by now, we take each one very seriously and we act on them. Firstly I'd like to put out there the philosophy of what our community was built on when it comes to the content, sharing, open source works, and how we use your work. Community content and images For the most part your content stays here, considering the ten of thousands of discussions in our forum and our growing gallery of albums, very few are used by us, outside of this community. There are exceptions however. We share your content within the realm of social media and newsletters. The following venues are used by us, to share your content. Please click on the links below to be taken to our community pages: Twitter Facebook Google + Pinterest Why do we share your work? Firstly, I am very proud of the work that is submitted here. I love sharing your work to the general public. Also, and mainly, we like to promote our community and our aim is to bring in more members, and create more awareness of our projects and missions benefiting our veterans (a new mission will be announced soon). The equation is, awareness = new members = higher rate of involvement in our veterans projects that we have throughout the year. So in a nutshell, when we share your work, and your albums, our community benefits, commentary is made on your work within social media, interest is gained, and a new member joins. Our copyright Please see our copyright at this link https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ The above copyright includes all work submitted to our community. This is an open source copyright. Community open-ness My personal philosophy regarding the web is this, it is here for many reasons but in my world, mainly for education, study and research, expanding knowledge, meeting friends, experiencing cultures we may never get a chance to experience in our lifetime, and helping others who need the help (in our case we are advocates for our veterans both in the US and Canada.) With that in mind, our community is open in many ways, anyone can see any part of our community, we are not closed off, we do not have areas for members only, we don't have paid only areas, we do not lock out our guests, they can see everything you can see (but guests cannot participate) and It's virtually impossible to get yourself locked out of our community, unless you did something atrocious or threatened bodily harm to a fellow member or staff. But, there are two areas "non-logged in" guests cannot see, and that is our Members Profiles and the Member Map. (UPDATE: unknown to me the Member Map has been open to guests, I have changed it as of today) In closing I'd like to thank you for reading this far, I thought it was important in the spirit of "Full-Disclosure" and especially in the case of our newest members, that you understand how your content is used by us. I understand there are concerns about how Google and other search engines use your content, please use this topic to open up your concerns regarding that as well. We want to hear you! Thank you

There has been fabulous work entered in our gallery lately, all the work is fabulous, please view our gallery, click on the images above and visit some great scrolling images and clocks and much more! Great job guys!

John, Again, not a complaint or bug, but rather a suggestion- and it may not be possible. I noticed that when replying to a post the only way to provide a graphic/picture is to upload that to the gallery, then transfer it to the forum topic response. It would be faster/easier, on many occasions, to have the ability to attach a file to the response. As the software is now programmed that process can be done from the desktop- eliminating the upload step.

Helping Our Website Viewers John, I am not sure where to post this suggestion/comment so I put it in each of the forums. If this isn’t permissible, please delete it. Hey folks, thought I’d pass along an experience I had today. Our neighbor, who lives across the street, dropped by to chat. They are new to the neighborhood (about a year) and we are getting to know them better each day. We knew that our neighbor is a marathoner. In fact, she was in the Boston race when the bomb went off. Fortunately, she was not injured. We also knew she is losing her sight. She has three young sons and she is going blind, tragic. Her sight was the reason for her visit. Sometime back, Microsoft gave away free copies of “Windows Eyesâ€. It is Microsoft’s integrated screen reader. I had given her a copy so that she could use it on her computer. She had a few questions and wondered if I could help. I showed her how to do a few things and then decided to brag little about our Patriot Woodworker sight- as a way to illustrate how the program worked when using a web browser. Everything was going great until we got to some of the images (one of them was mine!). The “reader†started speaking in “numbers†and “lettersâ€. What I discovered was that some of our images didn’t have descriptive names but rather “camera†names. Although the neighbor is not completely sightless, yet, it was confusing to her. It got me to thinking about some of our members- like Lt. Fallon and how difficult it must be to use a computer. We can all help by making sure we rename our images before uploading them. Screen readers and visually members will thank you! Lew

John, I am not sure where to post this suggestion/comment so I put it in each of the forums. If this isn't permissible, please delete it. Hey folks, thought I’d pass along an experience I had today. Our neighbor, who lives across the street, dropped by to chat. They are new to the neighborhood (about a year) and we are getting to know them better each day. We knew that our neighbor is a marathoner. In fact, she was in the Boston race when the bomb went off. Fortunately, she was not injured. We also knew she is losing her sight. She has three young sons and she is going blind, tragic. Her sight was the reason for her visit. Sometime back, Microsoft gave away free copies of “Windows Eyesâ€. It is Microsoft’s integrated screen reader. I had given her a copy so that she could use it on her computer. She had a few questions and wondered if I could help. I showed her how to do a few things and then decided to brag little about our Patriot Woodworker sight- as a way to illustrate how the program worked when using a web browser. Everything was going great until we got to some of the images (one of them was mine!). The “reader†started speaking in “numbers†and “lettersâ€. What I discovered was that some of our images didn’t have descriptive names but rather “camera†names. Although the neighbor is not completely sightless, yet, it was confusing to her. It got me to thinking about some of our members- like Lt. Fallon and how difficult it must be to use a computer. We can all help by making sure we rename our images before uploading them. Screen readers and visually members will thank you! Lew