Tips on Writing Battle Reports

Note:  this article was written 10 years ago, and probably needs updating. 

Edited lightly in 2025.

This is a tip sheet for those of you that are supporting our hobby by maintain a blog.

This is not a comprehensive document, just my observations on what seems to work, or not.  I am not an expert, these are just my thoughts.  Feel free to comment as I am just learning this art.

What constitutes success with a blogger?  Providing a pleasant experience for your readers.  This will result on return traffic and more readers.  But the only measure we have is number of visits your blog has.  I will have tips for both of these.

On providing a pleasant experience.

Providing a pleasant experience is important.  If the readers are uncomfortable, then they will not stay as long, and may not return.

Fonts and size:  Keep the fonts consistent.  I know this is troublesome.  If you are copying information from Word, Notepad, other sites, you can easily have Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier all in the same paragraph.  It is distracting.

On colors: There really are only a few combinations of foreground to background colors that work.  Others may have an eye catching appeal, but can quickly lead to eye fatigue.  Black on white, or black on light grey work best.  White text on black background quickly drains the biochemicals in the eyes leading to after images long after you leave the page.

Consistency:  Most of us are putting out content on similar topics all the time.  On my WWII page, about half my entries are Battle Reports.  Try to have a consistent layout of the battle reports.   To that end, I have a common header with information on who, what, where, mission etc…   Keep the fonts and sizes consistent. 

All my pictures are the same size.  To do this is easy with windows 10 and 11

    Open the folder where your pictures are in Windows File Explorer
    Create a folder called "Shrink"
    Copy all your photos into Shrink.
    Go to Shrink
    Highlight all your pictures.  Right Click, select  Resize pictures.  
    A Popup will appear,  Headlined with "Image Resizer for Windows"  I select "Custom Fit 1280 x 960.

 

Paragraphs should have a common beginning format.  Indenting some, and spacing others looks unprofessional.  Select a paragraph alignment and stick with it.  Either align left or justification.  My preference is justification

Typos:  When your blog entry is finished, don’t immediately publish it.  Have someone else read and edit it for typos.

Why this tank?  I just happen to like Lees.

Pictures.  Do have pictures, even lots of them.  But be cognizant of the band width and load times.  It’s easy to have megabytes of data being transferred with a page.  Not all broadband connections are the same.  If you are providing photos that are “normal” size, and when you click on them, expand to 5megapixels, be aware, that the user is downloading the 5mp picture, whether he views the expansion or not.  Also, when posting a picture.  Resize the picture to the size you want before applying it to the blog.  Don’t post a 1mp picture, and shrink it with the blogs Small, Medium, or Large settings.  What that means, the full picture is being sent, then resized each and every time someone calls on your site.  This means performance delays which can frustrate the user.  If you have a dozen of these, then the all of them will be downloaded and resized before the user can interact with your site.

<edit 2025>  Microsoft Windows 11 has embedded in it a program called "Image Resizer".  Select all your pictures, right click, select Image Resizer, and select how you want them to be.  I go with 1280 by 960 pixels.

Acronyms:  Don’t use them.  In this document, I use several, FOW, AAR, Batrep, SEO.  Do you know what they all are?  Maybe yes, probably not all of them though.  If you don’t know what they are, your content becomes a frustrating read.  Remember, ideally a lot of people will read your content.  So spell out the acronym, you only have to type it once but it will be read many times.

On Driving Traffic: Driving traffic is the art of finding web surfers and directing them to your site.  When I started blogging it was partially as an outlet for articles I have written, partially because I was encouraged to do so, but mainly to study how to drive traffic.  This is the world we are now living in, and knowing what works and what doesn't work may be a marketable skill.  So I am practicing with a topic I love, and while there is no cash at risk.  It’s a cheap education. 

Driving traffic to your site is work.  If you are doing this for fun, you can take a haphazard approach to this.  If you are doing this for real, then you must be methodical. 

There are three main ways to drive traffic to your site.  Through Paid Advertisements, Posted Links, and Search Engine Optimization.

Paid Advertisements:  Considering where I am posting this missive, I don’t need to go into this. 

Posted Links:  This is where most of your traffic is going to come from.  Posting links to your website from a forum of another website.  Usually by starting a new topic/thread and saying something clever, and providing a link.

1)    Research your forums that you want to post your links on.

2)   Have a catchy title for your blog entry.  It should be accurate but should also excite the imagination.  I post rather consistently, and the content has a consistent fit and finish.  But the view numbers of a specific page can vary by over 300% some times.  For instance, with some of my titles and numbers:

a.     At #1 “Great Expectations”, (507 views).  The title fit my mood at the time, but the numbers are disproportionate as compared to other After Action Reports (AAR’s).  This is one of my older Flames of War Battle Reports, and I suspect a number of these hits are students googleing the Charles Dicken’s novel.  Some of them probably wrote up a report of the failed attack by the Pip’s Canadian Armored Squadron upon the 326^th Infantry Division.

b.  At #2 “Panzer Grenadier-Division Grossdeutschland ”, (501).   This is premier division of the Wehrmacht.  It is also an original posting so it has had a lot of time to build up a view count. Lots of SEO traffic on that one.  (see SEO Below)

c.     At #3 “1944, Encounter with the Wiking SS”, (480).  This is one of my newer titles, so having it shoot to 480 views in a few months implies that the title caught a lot of attention.  There is another title written just a month later, "Attacking the Wiking SS at Vyazma" that shot to 380 views.

d.   At #4 “Stabilizing the Iron Curtain”, (465).  This title is only 4 months old, but for some reason has lots of views.

e. So what are the poor performers on my list?  “Monty’s Pythons Meet the Russians”, at 136 views.  Less than a third of the top rated page.  Followed by “Fighting in Another Hedgerow Nightmare", at 151 views.  Yet this one was just one part of a set of three Battle Reports (Batrep’s) written withing a one month span.  The third was “The Battle for Croydon” at 436 views.  Why then were two of these Battle Reports have 1/3^rd the views of the third?  My only thought is that the “Monty’s Pythons Meet the Russians” sounds a lot like “Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”

3)   When posting a link, post to the exact article.  Do not post to your front page.  In general, if people don’t see what they expect when they click on a link, they will click off very fast.  My observation is they will not navigate around your site to look for anything.  My rule of thumb is the title of the web page is the title I put in the forum link. 

4)    Don’t expect users to navigate around your site.  I have found by comparing pages from my “Driven” traffic, that less than 20% of the users look at the other articles on the site.  I have left several web pages unpromoted as an experiment, and they range from 60-90 views, where my top promoted pages run 500 views.

5)   Don’t link images and animations from other sites for presentation.  Or at least keep it to a minimum.  When you do this, your site is now beholden to someone else’s site.  Which may or not may not be up to snuff performance wise and can cause considerable delays.  Extreme examples are news sites with 30-50 picture links on the side.  All of them must load before you can read the second paragraph of the article that you are there to read.

               

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique to populate your content with commonly searched keywords that will attract the search engines and present your page on the top 10 selections.  A keyword is a word used by a search engine in its search for relevant Web pages.  Your blog entry should be sprinkled with the keywords that someone would use to find your blog entry.  Keywords must be inserted in such a way as to look natural to the naked eye.  Just lists of words will be rejected by sophisticated search engines and by the naked eye.  Important Keywords should be used multiple times for validation. 

One of the techniques I use that exploits keywords is writing up the units I am fighting with and against, and then referring to them often in the text.  So with “Great Expectations”, Steve Turn’s German 326^th Infantry division is mentioned 4 times.  So someone searching for that division might find my page. 

But let’s face it; unless the keywords are an exact match as the title, you have little chance of a Flames of War Battle Report hitting the top ten results of any search.  That being said, my venerable article on Panzer Grenadier-Division Grossdeutschland is #10 in a Google search, while my 9^th Panzer Division article is #3.

In general SEO techniques do work to a point.  If you are interested doing content for hire or are running an actual business with an online presence, then you must understand how it works.  Ignore the propaganda promising you top placement using just SEO techniques.  That is just so much hogwash.  You need either advertising and forum traffic to drive a web based business.  But a properly crafted page with careful word choices will put you miles ahead of pages that don’t practice SEO.

If you are interested, you will have to do your own SEO research.  It is beyond the scope of this document.

Corporate Nonsense

Odd things I have observed in corporate advertising world.

On Flintstone Kids Vitamins.

"Were the Flintstone's Kids, 10 million strong, and growing."

Obviously they haven't grown much, that jingle started around 1990, so in 22 years they haven't added much to their clientele.

I kept looking at a box of Betty Crocker's "Asian Helper", looking for the cooking instruction, "Just add Asian."

I really take umbrage with marketing when it tries to get the word "NEW" in even when what is new adds no value to the product.  As in "Same Great Stuff, Brand New Box!"  Might as well say, "Same old shit, brand new package."  However, Tostados’ "Hint of Lime" has done this idiocy one better.  "Coming Soon!  New Look!"  All the while reducing that hint of lime to imperceptibility. 

How Many More Children Must We Sacrifice On The Altar Of The Second Amendment?

How many children must die to protect the profit margins of the gun manufactures?

My position is this.  Repeal the 2^nd Amendment.  Abolish all fire arms.

I know there are a lot of reasons not to, but I have 27 new reasons to do so.   Add these names to the 2,500 children that are killed every year.

Why keep the 2^nd Amendment?  What is its purpose?  The primary reason is to give the citizenry the power to overthrow the government.  When it was written the citizens had the same weapons as the military, muskets.  While civilian metal workers could make military grade cannons if necessary.  Today, I don’t think you are going to produce an M-1 Abrams tank in your garage.  If you lined up a million citizens armed with AR-15’s against a single Army Division, I wouldn’t bet on the citizens to win.  So we are not going to overthrow the government by force of arms.

There is the argument that guns are necessary to protect our country from invasion.  See the above argument.  If our army cannot protect us from an invasion, then the civilians are not going to either.

Another argument is, “If guns are outlawed, then only outlaws will have guns.”  This will be true for a while, probably many years, but eventually the guns will be wheedled out of the general populous.

Then there is this argument, “There are 300 million guns out there, you’ll never get them all.”  To which I say, “When have Americans run away from a task because it was too hard?”

Then there is the hunting argument.  Maybe when hunting provided 10-30% of the family calories, but I doubt hunting provides a hundredth that now.  There is a reason for farms, it raises the most calories for an acre of land.  The wild stopped being able to support the general population about 300 years ago.

There is the argument to protect your home.  This one is valid, except than when a home of an armed citizen is invaded, the odds are actually better the home owner will be killed by his own gun then successfully repelling the invader.  It has to do with the mindset.  Law abiding, sane citizens are not mentally prepared to do violence.  The home invaders are.

And I love the argument, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”  Yes, but how many atrocities like these school shootings could have occurred without firearms?  I can think of only one in the last century.  It’s not the person, but the guns make it possible to kill that many people at one time.

I know repealing the 2^nd Amendment is neigh impossible, so can we amend it instead to read.

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people, except those persons capable of committing atrocities, to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Hurricane Sandy

Notes on what we did right:

Got ice six hours into the power outage. 

Kept the freezers shut.  They still had ice-cubes and frost 36 hours later.

Iced down perishables either in the refrigerator, or in coolers.

Had plenty of LED Flashlights on hand.  With power usage of a LED about 3% of incandescent bulb, none of them ran down in 36 hours.

What could have been better:

Take a shower before the emergency.  You never know when you’ll be able to take one again.

Don’t start a load of laundry.  Whenever the power goes out, you are stuck.

Things I either heard or thought about:

When the power went out, “Countdown, 71 hours till total social anarchy.”  This wasn’t so funny 36 hours into the outage.

“All he had to see by was the light of his Blackberry™,”  Reported by the BBC.

From the BBC reporting on the blackouts, “All these Americans are tweeting their news of the storm.  Who are they thinking is receiving them?  Are they expecting some overseas journalists to repeat them on the radio?”

I got in my car and looked at the GPS unit, and wondered if it was effected.  And if you don't know why this is funny, then I am not going to explain it to you.

And waxing poetic.  And the hand of God cleansed the earth of the election signage, removed power to the robo-call centers, and made all commercials unreceivable.  Peace reigned, but his people knew it not.

What am I supposed to think about this?

A succession of signs by the local shooting range.

Week 1

Live Pigeon Shoot.

Week 2

Live Turkey Shoot

Week 3

Running Deer Shoot

Week 4

Canned Ham Shoot.

I didn’t think the skeet thrower could handle a 5 pound Krakas.

Another Sign:
Huge Kid Sale!  Along with a bit of substantially smaller text that might explain how they can sell children.

The World’s Best Show for Twenty Bucks

Discovered a gem of a theater last night. A theater like no other outside of Disney.  The Dickens Parlour Theater, in Millville, DE.  Website:  http://www.dptmagic.com/, it is in Millville Delaware, near Rehoboth. It is a small, 50 seat theater where a different magician performs weekly. The stage was beautifully decorated like a main stage of an old style theater.  Gold leaf trims the stage, comfortable seating, while the staff, headed by Rich Bloch entertains and amuses you.

Before the show you can have dinner which we didn't know about, and afterwards you can have dessert, which we did. The dining area is tastefully decorated with interesting devices including an antique music box with a 3 foot diameter interchangeable music disk, and a fortune telling machine.  While you are having dessert, the magicians, both staff and guests, tour your tables and perform for you. We were lucky in that the visiting magician, Shawn McMaster, 

http://www.dptmagic.com/performers.php?perid=32, had a relative sitting at our table, so we got a lot of extra attention. 

We had a wonderful time, and went back to the matinee the next day.  This was in the Parlour room.  This is hidden behind a secret door which is disguised as a bookshelf.  A very intimate setting as there was seating only for about 12 people.  Once again the stage was set like a Victorian era sitting room, and adorned beautifully with gold leaf.  A contrast to that, and behind the stage curtain, was a teleportation machine that seems to be fully functional.

It was wonderful having interactive fun with the magicians.  I look forward to visiting again next time I am in the Delaware shore area. 

Eulogy for Philip W. Gardocki

“Duty, honor and perseverance," these are the words I would use to describe Philip Walter Gardocki. He was my father.

So what kind of a man was my father? In many cases, I only have to look in the mirror. We shared many mannerisms. All our clocks must be in synchronized. We both sing "Guinevere," when doing mundane tasks. We shared a number of "catch phrases", can run pi out to a dozen places,  and we both take a child like joy at solving strange problems.

Unnamed, but much appreciated
sailor plays a mournful taps.

The last problem we worked on involved measuring the diameter of a large artillery shell amidships on the USS Olympia, a pre WWI Light Cruiser docked in Philadelphia. The shell was secured to the wall and was immovable, and next to a gun that clearly was too small to fire it. In the end I used my belt to get the diameter, placed it on the slats of deck, then I pulled out my pen knife which had a 4" ruler on it to measure the slats.  Did you know that in year 1880, a 2x4 was actually 4" in width? Now it’s three and a quarter inches if you are lucky.  After that it was just a matter counting the slats and doing the math.

He was an amazing man; he would routinely ace Jeopardy, and was definitely smarter than a fifth-grader. And he fielded calls from each and every one of his grandchildren on various subjects ranging from the Bible, history, social studies and languages, of which he spoke at least seven.

To be sure my father had a lot of thorns. He could be abrasive, loud, and unforgiving. This same man placed fresh flowers in front of the Blessed Mother, every week, for 18 years, never missing a week. And when the going got tough, his sense of duty, honor, and perseverance has few peers. On many cases, when called to action, my father stepped forward, going above and beyond what was socially prescribed.

In the mid 1950’s he heard the country’s call and volunteered to defend this country’s freedom. He spent 6 years in the Navy on board the USS Alamo, a ship he only out lived by 3 months. And for 50 years we thought he was just an Engine-man, albeit a brilliant one. He was the second youngest man to be promoted to Chief Petty Officer* in the post-World War II Navy. But only in the last two years he revealed that he was not just an Engine-man, that was just a cover, he was a spy and interpreter of communications between the Soviet Submarine Fleet and their home base. He mentioned once that he held up the sea trials for 3 days of the USS Nautilus, our nation’s first nuclear submarine, because he lost track of the Soviet Sub that had been assigned to follow her.

My first response to these revelations was that he had read too many Tom Clancy novels. But the proofs he offered quickly convinced me of the truth of the matter.

“Duty, honor and perseverance," fast forward to the late 90’s, events were occurring that necessitated my sisters children to have a new home. My father, who was just about to retire, and with a new wife and family, stood and said, "We will take them!" And with perseverance, year in and year out, he made the drives, arranged the outings, made sure all the supports were there, and he never told them, that he was proud of them all, every one. 

*Though we now have evidence that it might be Chief Warrant Officer.

“Duty, honor and perseverance," now that those children are grown and seeking their own paths, he is still helping others, by diligently supporting his sister and his mother.

We are comforted knowing that he is in heaven, for he held every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.