Welcome to the website for the Scouting Tracker family of programs. These programs have grown out of my involvement in various aspects of the program of the Boy Scouts of America, and are thus obviously slanted in that direction.
The purpose of these programs is two-fold:
At this point there are three parts to the project - TrainingTrack, CubTrack , and BoyScoutTrack.
TrainingTrack has grown out of my tenure as District Training Chair. It seemed like records at the Council/National level were always getting lost and were somewhat suspect to begin with (like the fact that I was listed as "Not Trained" despite having taught pretty much every course offered). So I came up with a system to record training courses, generate reports of who needed what training, and otherwise allow me to try to determine how to most effectively provide the needed training to the Scouters in our District. Initially this took the form of a Perl script under Windows generating reports in PDF format, but when I passed the reigns of training over to another person I made modifications to make it Apache ASP-based so it could be accessed online. At this point I would classify the maturity of this program/system as beta, as it is currently running to maintain district training records but needs some improvements for usability.
CubTrack is my second attempt at a database program, addressing a need for pack advancement record keeping in a situation where there simply is not the money to buy software. Currently it is a Perl script and a set of HTML pages set up simply to show functionality and generate discussion on necessary features. I will have the web version linked from here shortly. My thought at this point is to use SQLite for the database and perhaps move to PHP for the scripting (if I can get that going without too much trouble).
BoyScoutTrack is my next project, moved up a bit due to the impending demise of Scoutmate software. I have been using Scoutmate for several years, and have developed OpenOffice.org documents and Apache ASP pages to provide reports in formats that were useful to me as Scoutmaster. This was possible because the database was in Access format rather than a proprietary format. One thing that never got going was ability to edit the database online, as my Linux machine did not have the ability to write to the MDB format. Rather than abandoning my work and going to a proprietary format, I would like to migrate to a database such as SQLite that works on Linux and Windows (and MacOS) and have perhaps a Perl application for local editing and PHP pages for online editing.
As this is still the very beginning of these projects, I welcome all suggestions for features that would be desirable as well as any offers of assistance. Main needs at this point are probably a couple of people to help get the Perl scripts in shape to be packaged for general use, someone to help with the PHP programming (assuming that winds up being the best direction for the web access), and someone to help with documentation. The first two programs (such as they are) can be downloaded through CVS, and I have created Forums to discuss each program. I look forward to interactions with people from all over, bringing their energy to this project.
Also, keep an eye out here for changes over the next few months. Hopefully by the end of the year I will have an opportunity to upgrade this page and also to polish this a bit with the programs.