HCMC Blogs

A number of links pointed at old URLS (domain name and path) for the mysteryquests, changed all those to point to current URL.

Also fixed a number of other errors such as links that point to non-existant directories, links on the French site that point to the English site, etc.

I think I've now caught up with all the errors reported by users through MF to me.

Access to the interpretations and teachers' notes sections is restricted. Authenticated users get values placed into session variables which are then checked on the relevent pages. For some reason, on the new server those values cannot be read from the session array. It did not appear that the subsequent pages started a new session (looked up the php reference on that and no files were created in the sessions dir), just that they couldn't read the values in the session variable. Nor did it appear that the problem resulted from different servers in the cluster writing to different temp or session dirs. Ryan checked on that for me.

I ended up passing the SID explicitly in the URL as a GET argument, and even though the subsequent pages make no use of that GET argument, the session array values are now available. So, it now works, but we're not sure why.

Link: http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/render_page.php?id=TOWE3&title=Tower%20Street

Last week, I encoded and posted Paul Hartlen's page on Tower Street. Paul (and my research assistant, Camille van der Marel) have proofread the page, checked quotations and bibliographical information, and verified links.

Today, I've encoded and posted a draft of Paisley Mann's page on Love Lane, Thames Street. I await feedback from proofreaders.

Things to do:

Add the church of St. Mary-at-Hill to the map and the index of churches. Tag the references to it in the Love Lane, Thames Street essay.

Reference to St. Christopher in Ekwall quotation in Love Lane, Thames Street essay not clear. Follow up.

Note spelling of St. Mary-at-Hill (the street). Correct mispelling on street index.

Correct Tower Street page and post final version. -- DONE!

SK has finished her proofing of the rebuilt site, and sent me a large set of changes that needed to be made, including the regeneration of some audio files in all the formats needed, and changes to a lot of the exercises. I processed the audio, and rebuilt the whole site, then uploaded the results. I also added some missing index entries.

SK also reported some bugs with the behaviour of audio. Some are clearly speed problems with CD drives, browsers or networks, which are sporadic and difficult to reproduce. One, though, is substantive: if you go through a page listening to all the audio, then go somewhere else, then come back, all the audio on the page plays at once. This is caused by the fact that we use an auto-play player, which is inserted into the page when you click on a link, and then auto-plays. When you revisit a page, the browser gives you a cached version of the page with all the audio players already inserted, but it runs their auto-play as they're loaded. This is annoying, but not disastrous. I experimented with some tweaks to encourage the browser to get a fresh copy of the page every time, but that didn't seem to work. Solving this problem may require the elimination of auto-play, so it's a judgement call for the site content experts really.

LSPW and I spent some time setting up the XML document for her 1621 Sonnet de Courval task; we also had a discussion with CC about transcription policies, which gave rise to these decisions:

• Typographical ligatures will be ignored, because only some are available in Unicode, and they're actually stylistic rather than substantive.
• Ampersands will be kept (i.e. not expanded to "et") because they're easy and not a problem for the reader.
• Long s will be transcribed as long s, both in ligatures and where standalone.

Did final tweaks to four documents, uploaded into the db, and then regenerated the master PDF.