Military Stickers Intimidate Me, but I Want to Learn

Question

I am so intimidated by Military/Veteran stickers. I know the profiles of those who were veterans deserve the stickers. I would sincerely love to be able to learn to apply them. Can someone who knows what they're doing with regard to military stickers take a look at this and tell me/show me what I did or didn't do correctly. I do not know what units this veteran was in, but I do not know how to eliminate that line in the sticker since it doesn't show up in the code for the sticker. Thanks for any help!

Harvey H. Hildreth

Answer 1

The unit= in most of the m&w stickers creates a category, so it must be named properly. If you do use it, search within the war/country streams and see if it exists (I can tell you that nearly all of the units of US Civil War already exist!). If so, you just lop off the part of the category name up TO the final comma and War and stick it in the unit= parameter. No need to add the category separately at the top. FOREX: if the unit served in was 1st Pennsylvania Infantry during the Civil War, the correct category is 1st Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry, United States Civil War. SO, in the unit parameter, it would be unit=1st Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry.

For WWI and II, same thing. Unit=category name minus the final war part.

If you do NOT know the unit, you can leave unit= as blank and fill in the proper branch, and the profile will be placed into the highest level category for the country/branch, like you did with Mr. Hildreth, who is included in United States Navy, World War II.

Units= is free text and won't create a category, so you can tell the story there if you have more than one unit the person served in.

Comments

Thanks, Natalie. I have made note of these instructions. Maybe as I use the sticker more it will become less difficult to understand.

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Natalie, I just applied a military sticker to another profile. I think I've got the basics of how to do a sticker, except for figuring out what to do if I have information about units. This fellow has a Veterans Administration Master Index Card on which were his dates of service and the following:

Cpl 9 Dev Bn 162 D B

I think the Cpl means Corporal (his rank) and I included that on his sticker. I did some Googling and I think the rest of the code is translated as "9th Development Battalion 162nd Depot Brigade."

I hate to be a pest, but could you look at how I did this sticker/category?

George Hubert Hildreth

Answer 2

I think you did great. There is no way to get rid of the Unit(s): text on the sticker, as that is part of the display, so don't worry about that. If you do figure that out, you can add it by adding in the units=<whatever unit he served in> parameter, and it should display what you enter.

On the upside, Ales is doing great things with template parameter suggestions in Data Doctors, so even if you enter something incorrectly, it will likely show up on his reports. So add what you can, we all appreciate your efforts!

Comments

Thank you for taking a look, Jonathan! (I'm trying to avoid generating any "suggestions" by doing it correctly in the first place.)