HCMC Blogs

Meeting today with KMF, JJ and SM about regnal dates. These are conclusions:

• We need to split Julian dates into three kinds: julianmarch (Stow's version of Julian, with the year beginning March 25), julianjan (Cheney's version, which Holinshed also seems to prefer, with the year beginning on Jan 1 (Cheney) or at "Christmas" (Holinshed -- I think we can use Jan 1 for this too), and juliannotsure, for dates where the beginning of the year is not clear.
• We need processing for Gregorian versions of all three (with the last being a combination of the two others).
• Stow Julian dates need to be switched to julianmarch.
• Other Julian dates need to be assigned to one of the three, depending on evidence.
• SM's excellent spreadsheet on regnal dates needs to be turned into a set of nested tables, with reigns containing tables of years, each year being a row with a unique id (william_1.3 for the third year of William I's reign), and each date for the beginning or end of a year being a date element tagged with the appropriate type of Julian value. This needs to be rendered into a handy reference page.
• Tagged regnal dates in Stow and elsewhere need to be linked to the appropriate row in the regnal date table using the -custom attributes.
• Rendering code needs to be written for the regnal custom attributes so that there's a useful mouseover popup, and clicking on them actually retrieves the relevant row of the regnal dates table as a popup with full info.

JS-R requested more changes to the db -- basically splitting out lawyers from the owners table, which involves creating three new tables, migrating some data, and removing other data, so I've been writing and testing a script on the dev db. It appears to have worked OK, and the RAs will test on dev tomorrow while I go ahead and make the same changes on live. Then I'll have to update other scripts and of course the documentation. I really don't like working so close to the wire (they start entering data on Thursday) but there seems to be no help for it.

On late duty.

Finished the first pass through updates to database structure, including some quite gnarly triggers to auto-generate description fields. This is largely untested, but I have also created introductory documentation for the field workers and passed it on to them. In the process of testing today I once again encountered the dreaded caching problem that afflicts us with web content hosted through NFS mounts. I'm looking forward to getting this project shifted onto the project VM so we don't have this problem.

I've given RAs access to the dev db so they can play around without worrying about damaging real data.

Leaving a little early.

Met with ID and TM, visiting from Texas, and had a good long discussion about dictionary production, layout, publication and related topics. Very helpful.

TG finished the first run through the History site the other day, and we're now tidying up and fixing minor annoyances. I've done a lot of table tweaking to get better layouts, and fixed a couple of oddities (pages that were unaccountably set to not be published, and that sort of thing).

Hell-for-leather on the Landscapes project...

Wrote and tested a bash script that does tarred gz backups with a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly staging system for the team Zotero db. Handy script to have around for all sorts of purposes, actually.

Working on the dev db, and recording all my structural changes in an SQL file I can run against live when I'm done, I've enhanced the owners table to add a useful auto-generated desc field maintained by triggers. Ditto with the title field. I've also separated out the name storage of institutional from human owners. All this has been a small education in how tricky it is to define triggers; I keep getting caught out by the delimiter thing. I still have to rework the props table, once we've decided on how best to describe properties; I think it'll have to be a listing of all the possible identifiers that might apply, along with making the desc field use an elegantly-constructed combination of them. But we don't yet know what might apply, so at the beginning I may have to err on the side of more identifier fields than we end up needing.

Had a good meeting with JS-R, the RAs, and JM (by Skype) to plan next week's initial work for them in the LTO.