Colonial Despatches

Now the new Rutabaga is online, I was able to update the backups of the jpg_scans image tree with an almighty rsync operation.

A further 1348 page-images have been added to the manuscript image browser, covering Vancouver Island Public Offices and Miscellaneous correspondence, 1860. Transcriptions are now being linked into these images.

Yesterday I generated all the OAI metadata using my local copy of the main eXist 1.1.1 application, forgetting that its XQuery functionality is limited compared with the newer one. The resulting records were missing lots of lookup data from the ographies, so I've regenerated and re-uploaded them.

A page has been added to the site explaining the OAI-PMH metadata interface and how it works, with links to example queries returning XML responses.

My local copy of ColDesp was out of sync and out of date, so I've updated it. This took a bit of diffing to figure out which files had been removed from the set, along with their corresponding OAI files. Then I regenerated all the OAI records and uploaded them into the server db. Finally, I backed everything up, and took a complete local copy of Tomcat + eXist to copy to my laptop, for the conference, in case of connectivity issues.

The index pages (people, places, vessels) have some peculiar referencing complexities, in that any item on the page can have links which reference other items on the same page, or items which must be retrieved by AJAX. Previously, in the case of a local item, the JavaScript was moving the content from its normal place on the page into the popup, and then in theory putting it back again, but that actually resulted in a blank space in some situations (such as when the popup was closed, rather than being filled with new content). I've now rewritten the system so that it does what the Mariage site does: it clones the content of the item into the popup, and deletes it when it's done.

The problem: on the places index page, when you click on a place within a places write up, the clicked-place vanishes from the places index. Rather than cloning the content, the link appears to relocate it. This may be happening in the bios and vessels list as well.

A further 941 page-images have been added to the manuscript image browser, covering Despatches from Vancouver Island to London, 1860. Transcriptions are now being linked into these images.

YTD stats retrieved and stashed.