HCMC Blogs

AY sent me an html outline of the proprosed structure of the new site. So far so good. Some of the content areas in the old site do not appear in the new site, so I asked for clarification.
Other issues:
- they wish to continue to have a dynamic list of courses offered by professor and professor-specific course descriptions
- they wish to allow the dept secretary to continue to make routine text edits, through contribute rather then page-based fckeditor if that's more compatible with the templates
To accommodate that, we'll need to php-ize the pages. Since we're doing that we may as well also php-ize the navigation structure in place of the current hard-coded stuff on every single page.

Talked with MJ next door on modifying OJS to accommodate reviewer + author. He said not trivial, but doable would take maybe a week of solid work probably.

Created a page that looks like the PIR journal pages and links to them at http://web.uvic.ca:8080/~pir/index.htm

Did more research into css kludges. Could use the :before pseudo-element to insert texts before items in the Search dropdown and the BrowseBy list. I.e. change "author" to "review author" and change "title" to "book author or title". For this to work more reliably (i.e. in IE), those elements need to have id attributes. I've asked if the library would be willing to do that.

Started work on the cover for volume 18, which needs the usual changes to date and volume number, but also requires adding HT to the cover as book review editor. Since this was all done in Windows, and the master volume is being built in Windows because that's where I have my working desktop XEP, I'm working in Illustrator CS2 on XP in my VM. I started following my own instructions elsewhere in the blog, changing the text where required, and remembering that there are knockouts for the years at the bottom, so you have to change the year twice, once in the black top layer and once in the white layer below it (send the top layer back one in the z-order to get at the white layer, then send the white layer below it when you're done).

I have a lot of work to do once the TOC and page numbers are finalized (this will depend on the final proofing, which can't be done until the translated abstracts are in, so I have to wait a bit). When everything else is ready, I'll follow these steps to produce the final cover. A more detailed description of the process is here. In the meantime, I wanted to do a test print, so I tried to export from Illustrator as a PDF; Illustrator froze every time I tried it. After reboots didn't help, I did some Googling and found that this is a symptom of a corrupted preferences file, so I deleted c:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS2 Settings\AIPrefs. That did the trick, and I was able to save a PDF. Then after reconfiguring my printer in XP (the IP has changed since I last printed from the VM), I was able to do a quick test print on 8x11, which looks OK.

Staying on campus for the TRUTH meeting this evening, so I kept working. Had to do some urgent stuff on the Adaptive DB and editorial corrections on ScanCan, and I needed to get that stuff all out of the way so that I could concentrate on Mariage tomorrow, so it was worth staying late. Also had to review some documents for committee work.

I wanted to be further ahead today; however, the first 1848 despatch was a complicated affair, especially in terms of formatting and editorial emendations, or misses. I will finish the abstract and keywords for the first file, as well as placeholder bio, by late tomorrow morning. Hopefully, the next handful will be more straightforward.

LSPW pointed out that guillemets should have spaces between them and the quote itself, so I fixed that in the CSS. Also noticed that the <foreign> tag has (quite usefully) been used to mark foreign words, principally Latin and Greek, in the references, but that I wasn't handling it, so I've added some rendering for it (italics, basically), and modified the XSLT that handles the <head> tag in a reference to make sure it gets processed.

I've made some changes based on our discussion this morning:

• Linked files now show up in the table view and in the record view as paperclip images (which act as links to the file).
• The "Linked files" field is now second in the sequence, and I've set the default number of columns to display as 9, so that you still see all the columns you saw before by default in the table.
• There's another Search button at the top of the search page, so that it's easier to get to it when you are using the fields near the top.
• The default sort order is now Archive followed by Côte.
• You should now be able to delete user-defined fields from a record, simply by setting them to empty. In the case of boolean fields, they always show up as a drop-down list in the editing view now, so you can also set them to "empty" in order to remove them from the record.
• The default number of records returned in a search is now 500 rather than 50.

The remaining features we'll be adding later are better sorting options in the search itself, and also the ability to sort the rows of any table of records by clicking on a column header. We should be able to add those features next time I can get some time on the project (possibly November).

Quick tweak to a couple of pages from DR. While doing it, I noticed that there are many pages with <a name="top"></a> in them; that's invalid, so we should fix it. I'll do the site as a whole when I get the chance.