HCMC Blogs

Worked 2 hours.

On late duty.

I have the RAs added to the svn repo, and the documentation for basic transcription and encoding is much further along. We've also done a detailed preliminary budget in a form that enables us to play around with options and variable costs, which is handy. Eight MSS are actually ready for transcription, which is more than we'll actually get done in the next couple of years, although we may do MSS that aren't yet in the ready set. 400 minutes over the last week.

Over the weekend I knocked off a few issues, including the key requirement to allow versioning of filenames, so that we can take advantage of browser caching for the JavaScript without risking the use of stale index files. There are a couple more minor things that need to be fixed for the 0.7 release, but they shouldn't take more than another couple of weeks. Then we can pin our projects to a specific release, which is more robust.

Trying to get something working (but failed...).

Did a whole pile of work over the break, which is best viewed on the GitHub repo. Today I've been bugfixing and optimizing the JSON retrieval stuff, which is now working pretty well even on heavily-throttled connections. Raised issues for a couple of bugs, and started adding a search for our interviews site (but was stopped by a bug).

Using 24 hours to cover leaving early on Dec 24, then three non-stat days while the university is closed over the holiday.

GL discovered that the majority of the few hundred un-used person entries in the personography are from a single object in a TINA. He put pointers to the people in there, which is the right thing to do, but it ends up making the page too big for use once all the standoff people are injected. Since we already special case the directories for the exact same reason, we came up with an alternative plan: create a new pointer--"ajax:"-- that can precede another point:

"ajax:prs:obac1"

The resoluton of the ajax pointer is simply to spit out whatever it prefixes:

"ajax:prs:obac1" --> "prs:obac1" --> "names_o.xml#obac1"

Currently we add these "ajax:" links in the original xml creation only; I see no reason for an encoder to ever need to do that, but it will be helpful for lots of documents going forward (like the AZ Index, which will be gigantic).

Also discussed lots and titles with MH. Saxon was giving up during the standalone xml validation; the files were too big and too many. But we took this an indicator that we might not be doing something that made any sense. So rather than creating horizontal tables, we'll just links to its own map and its story.

274 new page-images (in three different sizes) from the following volume have been added to the Colonial Despatches collection: RG7 G8C Volume 18 (BC 1871 Despatches from London). These will now be linked into the transcription documents.

Following conversation with SA and MH, we've decided to take MH's story/lot outputs from the old build process into the repo and use those as a basis for creating new story/lot pages for the site.

Rather than create a large map for each title, we'll do the following:

• If a lot or a title has an associated story, then add a link from the page (i.e. title_202.html) to its associated story (title_202_story.html)
• The story page will include the map and a combined table of all the data associated with that story

I'm now in the process of creating these story pages (sans map) and it's fairly straightforward (though it still takes a bit longer than I'd like in the build process).