HCMC Blogs

Working all day on integrating MJ's map display code into the site. Much of it was positioned and sized in pixels, which is natural because the main component is an image sized in pixels, but it is possible if you're careful to size all the text components in ems and percentages to make for flexibility. I laid out the menus using a different approach (inline-display list items, with the right menu floated, rather than floating list-items). Then I started work on the display of the annotations. I've arrived at a solution that I think works pretty well, but there are still some oddities with regard to positioning that I need to work on, because I'm placing the annotations in a static location. I'm half-way there.

This all precedes somehow adding the main site styling to the page, which is going to be a challenge because of space constraints. I also have an issue with some zones not showing up; these appear to be the ones which have customized id attributes because they're going to be pointing at places in the places database.

While working on this, I also re-organized the map gallery display, to make it less confusing. The mouseover popup now appears in the right margin rather than over the top of the moused-over image, which means that the original is not obscured, so you can more easily click on it.

The tiles I got from maps-for-free.com are a bit too bright for my purposes, so I built a workflow to adjust them.
1) adjust an example image (like this one.) to your liking (I used the GIMP to produce this.)
2) make sure you're using v6.5.3-4 or higher of ImageMagick (first version that supports hald-clut)
3) create a hald colour lookup table with IM like this: "convert hald:8 adjsuted_image.png hald-clut.png". The output image is a palette of the colours used in your adjusted image.
4) test things out by doing this: "convert original_file.png hald-clut.png -hald-clut adjusted_version.png"
5) in my case the results weren't quite right, so I ran my GIMP preset against the hald-clut.png to adjust the palette and then ran #4 again.
6) write a script that recursively runs this command on all of your images, like this: "for i in $( find ./ -name *.jpg); do convert $i hald-clut.png -hald-clut $i; done;"

The results can be seen right now at zoom level 6 across the Mediterranean here: http://hcmc.uvic.ca/grs/map/index2.html

Replaced the existing live site code with the new version which includes the ability to choose which fields appear in search results.

I now have so many versions of this code running in so many projects I need to make sure I know where the latest versions are. The latest codebase is definitely the one in the AdaptiveDB right now; it also incorporates the oneToMany field updates, which are not used in the AdaptiveDB itself. Other codebases, though, incorporate PDF output code which is not in this codebase because it's not needed.

Tested two approaches to handling XML documents, one of which is namespace-aware and the other which is not. Both have advantages and disadvantages, so it's not yet clear which approach we should take for IMT. I need to make this switchable at the level of DlgXmlIndex and HcmcImtDoc, via public properties.

Sidetracked into investigating authentication for MyNDIR.

• Added support for the keyword list, which shows up at the bottom of the item data.
• Made keywords clickable, invoking a search on that keyword.
• Enhanced the CSS with some gratuitous drop-shadows.
• Reworked the footer, so that it doesn't obscure anything (it was position: fixed, which is problematic, so now it's not).
• Made the site title a link to the default find-everything search.

I also investigated how much work it would be to put authentication in place. After copying over the framework that I'd originally created years ago for the Devonshire project, I realized that we have purposely excluded the authentication framework code from our Cocoon build, because it has multiple dependencies and swells the size of Cocoon significantly. If I were to put authentication in place, it would require a complete rebuild of eXist+Cocoon just for this project. I don't really want to go there.

Decided to make the related-item linking more sophisticated, so it can use the title of the target document to create the link; that's more meaningful than the xml:id. I've put this code in a separate module which I can use for a range of utility functions later on, to avoid code duplication, and I've also added a link to view the original XML of the document as well as the HTML link -- this is handy for debugging as much as anything else.

Investigated the structure of the templates and code blocks provided in the Cascade CMS. Had a very difficult time figuring out how to modify the scope of changes, particularly how to modify elements that appear in all pages in only one section (e.g. adding an element to the secondary navigation bar). Also failed to figure out how to modify the templates to allow placement of blocks I'd created. Presumably, there's some way of writing a template which is dependent on the template provided by the central Sytems guys.

Judy went through the list of features for content-editors and then the two of us reviewed her findings before I sent them on to the committee through the Sharepoint site. If we upload an image and the create a link to that image, we couldn't figure out how to overwrite the image. When we uploaded, the system generated a new file name. Worse, when we deleted the original file, the link to it was also deleted. Of course, when we then renamed the new file to the original name, the link was not magically rewritten.

Made these changes, to make it easier to work remotely with someone clicking through the slides, and to clarify some things:

• Removed all the incremental bullet displays.
• Added explicit numbering to slide titles.
• Added highlighting to XML tags in the <biblStruct> example.
• Expanded the notes considerably.

I think it would be super helpful to have the additional option of adding a group to an event along with the characters. Thus there would be a column of "Characters associated with this event" as well as a second "Groups associated with this event" column in the "Event/Character" relationship page. There are tons of collective noun groups in ancient Greek myth, and some of them are not groupings of specific people, but generic entities (ie The Athenians) that cannot be back-filled.
For things like the Argonauts, it would be necessary to be able to search for an event using a character in the character filter (like Hercules), and have it bring back events that have him in a group but not listed individually (a bunch of stuff that happens on the Argos).