HCMC Blogs

Found the XSLT problem; it was caused by two different abbreviation forms which are marked up in the same way, which is a problem for the markup team (and passed on to them); however, my code should have been trapping for it, and that's now working. The status now is:

• 96 poems are functioning correctly WITH apparatus.
• 89 poems are functioning correctly, but don't have apparatus (either because it's not done yet, or there are no other witnesses).
• 6 poems have a problem with text appearing mingled with the line numbering.
• 1 poem has a block of text in an odd font.
• 1 excerpt (the last) appears to be missing, or has no title and so can't be accessed easily.

Following the addition of a lot of new markup in the form of apparatus files during the summer, I took a look at all the poems in the collection to figure out what's working and what's not. Results:

• 88 poems are functioning correctly WITH apparatus.
• 88 poems are functioning correctly, but don't have apparatus (either because it's not done yet, or there are no other witnesses).
• 6 poems have a problem with text appearing mingled with the line numbering.
• 9 poems don't display because of an XML/XSLT error.
• 1 poem has a block of text in an odd font.
• 1 excerpt (the last) appears to be missing, or has no title and so can't be accessed easily.

Met with Catherine on FranctoToile, she asked about:
- putting a .htaccess file on the site
- limiting access to all netlinkIDs AND 1 made-up user name
- allowing empty search string in the advanced search interface (so users could find e.g. all transcripts of females regardless of what those transcripts contained)
- whether we should break the collection up into subcollections, what the names for each of those sub-collections should be (possibly continents), and whether we'd then want to include an additional field in the xml data files relating with that piece of information in it.
- changing the word "Watch" to "Browse" in the English interface.

Dominique Clément in History through Claire Carlin enquired regarding helping him put on a workshop for faculty on creating a simple web page. Discussed with Greg, Martin, Elizabeth and responded to Dominique as below. Dominique replied to say he'd check into Kompozer and get back to me next week:

On question #1 (who's the hcmc contact?): Stewart.

On question #2 (what's the date?): Wednesday November 21 from 2:30-4:00

On question #3 (nature of hcmc participation): If your audience is largely or exclusively Humanities, then HCMC is the sensible source for technical expertise. We know about the university's standards for web pages and what the central computing people recommend now and plan for the future. We've also got experience designing websites for a range of purposes and to be maintained by a range of people, so can provide useful input on what kinds of features are relatively simple to do and which kinds are more demanding. We can also talk about what are better and worse ways of implementing commonly used features.

On question #4 (location) We do have labs which could be used if available. The Clearihue computer labs also have rooms which can be booked - we've approached the people running those labs and they're ok with the idea. The room we finally settle on may depend on the software we elect to use. (see below) We have a projector, as do most of the rooms we'd be booking, so that shouldn't be an issue.

On question #5 (software) Right now the university supports Dreamweaver and its derivative product Contribute, but users have to buy the software. Sometime in the next few years that position may change as they introduce a web-based Content Management System intended to allow creation of web pages. Dreamweaver is on some computers in the computer labs, but it's a pretty industrial-strength program for casual or neophyte users. Do you care about hardware platform (Windows vs Mac)?

The computer labs also provide a program called nvu, which is a much simpler authoring program than Dreamweaver and will likely do what the beginning user wants. The most recent releases of nvu are called Kompozer, and we may be able to get the people running the labs to update their copies of nvu to Kompozer. The other advantage of Kompozer is that it is free and a version exists for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. You might want to download it, try it out and see if you think it is appropriate for the intended audience. http://www.kompozer.net/

Last couple of notes:
In addition to encouraging people to create simple pages for themselves, the HCMC also wants them to be aware of:
- planning and good practices
- what kind and level of support HCMC can (and can't) provide
- issues commonly encountered by beginners or occasional authors, and how to deal with them
- client-server issues: uploading and file permissions

Modified css rules for hilited text and paragraph based on request from Jennifer.

Tested editing .inc files in Contribute (specifically the section navigation bar files). Modified various items in navigation bars using Contribute, tested to make sure resulting pages worked properly and then showed Jennifer how she could make the same kind of edits in Contribute.

I caused problem for Jennifer by creating two links to the same page. Jennifer thought there were two separate pages so deleted some information from the page thinking only one of two copies of the file would be affected. Sorted that out.

Fixing various minor issues on philosophy site, such as:
- updating the js arrays for courses offered and coursed taught by each instructor
- scaling, cropping and uploading professor images
- investigating reports of edits made in FCK editor that subsequently disappear again from site; can't reproduce that behaviour, so followed up with Liz, who couldn't reproduce it either. She'll send more detailed report if it happens again

Cleaned up and cropped the two new images for which we have metadata; tweaked the IMT files; created the thumbnails in PhotoShop; created the 800px versions; and then uploaded the resulting files to the working folder on the SAN, and the image files to various locations in the site structure. We're now ready for Helena to start marking up those images.

While working on new images for the Mariage site, I noticed that the quality of the IMT's "web view" scaled-down graphic was much inferior to the results obtained from scaling the graphic in PhotoShop. Greg and I started looking through the Graphics32 documentation, and discovered that the addition of one line of code could cause IMT to invoke a TKernelResampler when doing the downsampling; this is slightly slower, but produces a vastly improved result.

I've changed the version number to 1.6 for this, which means that I need to write a converter XSLT file; it also means that I need to generate a new schema from Roma, and check all the differences (I currently know of only one, the @value attribute having changed to @when on the <date> element, but there are bound to be others). This should be a priority now.

Greg also suggested a new "make a thumbnail" feature, which we kicked around till we came up with this:

If you click on Make Thumbnail when there's nothing selected, it defaults to selecting the whole image; otherwise, it works with the selection. A dialog box pops up which shows you the current Left, Top, Width and Height values, which are editable; changes are reflected in the actual selection. When you've tweaked those, you can specify the output size for your thumbnail; it can be proportional or not. Then you click OK, and get a file save dialog, then a thumbnail image is saved. This would be EXTREMELY handy for the Mariage site.