HCMC Blogs

HC from the French department is taking over administrator role on the APFUCC listserv, hosted on uvic's servers. Showed her how to use the admin interface to do the tasks she'll need to do (approve posts, unsubscribe people).
Added the list of email addresses provided to the listserv, so it is now live.
Discovered (confirmed by Joe Sparrow) that the admin interface allows the admin to see posts before approving, but not to edit them. Not sure if there is an easy way to edit posts before distributing them, so emailed mailmanhelp.

JS-R reported a bug in the sequence of results reported in the output tables, which I tracked down to my mdh_getTotals function, in which I had an ORDER BY clause sorting the results by count descending. That would put them out of order with the stored ethnicity groupings they represent, some of the time. Commenting it out seems to solve the problem without any side-effects.

Also incorporated several requested changes into the wizard explanation page, which is now ready to go, and made tweaks to the display of ethnicity groupings (space after colon) and output tables (explicit background colours to prevent the content div border from showing through, when the tables are too big for the content div and spill across the border).

At JS-R's request, added an explanation for starred population totals in the D table (where the numbers are insufficient for meaningful results). Also created an explanatory page introducing the Query Wizard, which is awaiting feedback from JS-R. I think we're getting close to the point where we can replace the existing main site with the development site.

All done. This is usually the trigger for them to assign a couple more for review, of course...

It'll be useful to know the ips of wizard users so that we can delete our own during testing. I'm also storing a timestamp on update.

Added automatic storage of all wizard queries (in XML and URL format) in a table in the database, so we can (if we want) look at what people have been throwing at the wizard.

The next iteration of Transformer needs to get rid of its dependence on the buggy TURESearch component from jclUnicode.pas, which has serious issues. I've been searching for ages for a decent open-source alternative, and now I think I've found one. It requires Delphi 2009, but that's on order (I think), and I do need a relatively straightforward project with which to pilot a move to D2009; Transformer is probably that project. This would be the migration path:

• Get D2009 installed and working.
• Create a new projects tree.
• Migrate Transformer files into it, along with other key libraries from my current tree (such as Batch, Translate, etc.).
• Install XDOM 4.2 (or ADOM, if that's the current name of the appropriate version), and Project JEDI JCL and JVCL.
• For each sub-project (Batch, Preferences, Translate, FormState, SplashAbout, RecentFiles...), create a new test/dev app in which to develop it.
• For each sub-project, remove all TNT dependencies, and rationalize all dependent code so that Unicode strings are now used. Pay special attention to any SystemFunctions, FileFunctions and StringFunctions code which may be invoked. It may be necessary to start a new version of each of those files, into which we only add functions that we turn out to need.
• Once all the dependent projects are working, bring in Transformer and strip out TNT from that.
• Get the PERL RegExp wrapper package and install that in Delphi.
• Rewrite the string replace code based on it.
• Once everything is working, think about adding the XSLT support through libxml, as in IMT.

NLM 2.3 output (transformed from the 3.0 version output) is now available on the site, from the article pages. I'm sure we'll revisit this many times, but we do now have something to pass on to the OJS folks.

To add links to images once the file has been fully marked up, you have to add code manually. The basic block looks like this:
<p>
<img class="docImageCentre"
src="../../images/site/165643_2.jpg"
alt=""
onclick="openWindow('../../images/site/165643_3.jpg', '../../'); return false;" />
</p>
In some cases the first part of the path is "../../", in others it is "../" and in others an html comment containing the string " rootpath " appears instead. Amanuel's code must process that placeholder, though sometimes it seems to get it wrong. I'll try hardcoding the right path and using the placeholder.

Also turns out that you can "assign" an image to a page. I think that makes the image appear at the top of the page with a full caption. You can't assign an image and have a link to the same image on the page, apparently.

Spent the best part of the day making changes and regenerating the vinland site to see if the changes worked. Should be able to finish up by mid-day tomorrow.