Finished marking up Lingard, going much faster towards the end because of Transformer. That's up on the site, along with some tweaks to other articles that I found as I went along. I also built the new volume, which comes in at 124 pages, but will be longer when the contributor bios are all there (we're missing Aðalsteinsdóttir, Batey, Engilbertsson, Gunnbjörnsdóttir, Jóhannsdóttir and Lingard).
September 17, 2008
Met with MB and CC to finalize how to integrate information from the events calendar to the French site. Will use the same system as GRS, but were interested in also seeing a system where the links on the home page go to entries on the events page of the dept site, and the each entry in the events page has a link to that event in the UVic Events calendar site. On the GRS site, the links on the home page go to the UVic Events calendar site.
Met with E, CP and JL to discuss the date, venue, invitees etc. for a launch event, and to assign tasks in preparation for it. My tasks are:
- Continue working with PS to get the names markup working, and add a new feature to the biblio page which expands a bio via ajax to add links to all mentions of someone in the text.
- Write a home page blurb with a sort of description of our ultimate vision for the project.
- Write a "disclaimer" page, listing the things people should be aware of before they trust the current transcriptions.
- Create print materials for the launch: a handout, small posters (11x14), and a large poster for printing on foam etc. We need to find a designer to help with this.
On Sept. 11, I posted the Guidelines for Contributors page (under the "About" tab). Two documents for potential contributors are linked to this page: "Contributor Guidelines: Street or Site Essays" and "Map of Early Modern London Citation Guide." Both documents are available as MS-Word 97-2003 files and as .pdf files. The link on the "blank" street/site pages now takes one to the Guidelines for Contributors page.
Other recent postings: Abchurch Lane (street page) and "The Marriage of London Stone and the Boss of Billingsgate" (Library text).
September 16, 2008
Both Greg and I volunteered to be research subjects, so I'm out of the office from 3 today (and back by four, I hope, but can't be sure). Greg goes tomorrow.
PAB came down to discuss her three PhD projects, which are quite ambitious, with Greg and I. They'll need both hosting and programming support from us, so she'll need to enlist some faculty muscle to grab a big enough chunk of our time. One will involve substantial work on the IMT.
I'm using Transformer to auto-markup some bits of text while working on ScanCan documents, and found it annoying that after every operation in the main screen there's a popup you need to dismiss. Added a command-line parameter, /suppressPopups, which prevents this. May or may not document it. Transformer is deuced handy...
Got half-way through marking up the final article for vol 17, distracted by meeting with PAB and the need to work on the Hulq stuff. Should be done tomorrow.
Sarah has finished reworking the exercises based on input from the elders, and created over a hundred new audio clips. We processed these into the five formats we provide on the site, and then rebuilt all of the exercises with the corrections. The results are up on the www-dev site, and after they've been checked, we'll replace hrd/hulq with the new materials.
In testing the CanMys site instance on the new server cluster, a number of problems with the site (not so much the new server) have come up which I have had to address.
First: the privileges on many files were wrong, causing problems with the suPHP on the new server (the php is invoked by clicking on an image, which goes and gets a larger version of the same image using PHP). I fixed the privileges so they were more secure and compatible with PHP.
Second: in the vinland site there are images and a flash player object on a page. When the user clicks on the image, an animation of that image is supposed to appear in the flash player. This works only on IE. The javascript call appears to be ill-formed (according to the Adobe documentation on the loadMovie function).