HCMC Blogs

As part of the teiJournal plan, and because it also helps with creating my presentation for Friday's Vancouver trip, I wrote the next part of the project description, the description of output formats. The idea of the user-configured ad-hoc anthology is beginning to get clearer.

One key aspect of teiJournal will be the ability of the editor to configure as much as possible of the presentation information through a user-friendly interface. There is so much to configure that the key problem is going to be organization and storage of this information. One way to think of this is as "style blocks", each of which controls a particular aspect of a particular presentation format.

Typical blocks would be: the default format of bibliographical info (Chicago?), layout of each format (e.g. running titles), the content of each format, and the abstracted and user-configurable aspects of each output type (font, style, page size and other choices, especially for PDF).

Style block code will find its way into two kinds of output: XSL:FO (for PDF), in which it will be inserted inline, and CSS, where it will control the display of predefined XHTML classes. The most convenient way to store this information will be as XSL Attribute Sets. Since these are XML, they can be stored directly into the database, and read easily. The data itself is going to be a combination of CSS and XSL:FO attributes and values; we need to come up with a template-based GUI for editing it.

Finally, there will be some types of style choice that do not translate into CSS or XSL attributes. For instance, the choice of MLA or Chicago formatting for bibliographies or references will be a choice between two blocks of rendering code. There may not be many of these.

Including time spent working this out so far.

Nobody could remember whether the audio system in the CALL worked, and if so, how. Greg and I spent some time working on it, and discovered that it does work. There's an XLR mic input on the pillar at the far end of the room (where all the other switches are), which is connected to an input on the preamp. The preamp stereo output cables were disconnected; I plugged them back in. They go to the equalizer, which is then hooked into the power amp, and the power amp drives the speakers on the wall at the far end. We set up and tested with two mics (one of our Sony F780s, and the Shure SM81 that belongs to the CALL), and both work. The SM81 is more sensitive when you stand back from it, so it's better suited to announcements or presentations.

The old mic stand in the workshop works, but we also found a better boom stand in the archive room, and grafted the top of the old stand to it so that the SM81 will attach to it. The SM81 needs a wind shield, which Greg can order from Long and McQuade.

Created a custom RSS URL using the HCMC Stats function, drawing only from posts which have the Announcements category checked, then Stew plugged it into MagpieRSS; the main HCMC site feed now shows only announcements.

The YUI-EXT library, now called Ext, is approaching its version 1.0 release. There are many changes from the version 0.4 I have been using, so today I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade (have to do it sooner or later). For the most part it is not difficult to make the changes, but there are a few areas causing me problems. However, the viewer program is mostly working under Ext 1.0, and now that I have most of it figured out, the administration program should be a faster upgrade.

Built and tested the installer, updated a range of different files, fixed a couple of bugs and typos in licence docs and the tutorial, updated the Website, and released version 1.5.

The file aggresseure.xml (Présage malheureux) in the regular tree on the network seems to have been overwritten by an older version, lacking the <biblStruct> tag Claire and I added the week before last, and containing a link to an image mapped on drive Z. I imported the <biblStruct> code from a newer backup, and corrected the image path.