HCMC Blogs

In the process, made some useful tweaks to rendering rules, to handle markup inside keywords as well as monograph and journal titles that might end with a closing quotation mark (rare, but it happens). Vol 21 is basically ready to go now.

Started entering the fixes from JT's proofing of the volume; then got diverted by the need to urgently compile web stats for a grant application. I've only been able to get stats for the last year -- older stats have disappeared from the Urchin server on webstats.uvic.ca -- and there are limitations (no distinct visitor data on that Urchin instance, for example). But I did the best I could and sent a spreadsheet to JT.

Urgent requirements are arising every two minutes on this project at the moment, so we've spent much of the day trying to research and organize how we might get ArcGIS running and integrate it with the rest of the project, as well as providing half-finished untested tools to the RAs, and work out backup strategies. Waiting on netlinks being assigned to all the RAs before we can get the project workspace set up and working; meanwhile, I've created a preliminary document to let everyone know some basic rules around file and folder naming etc., pending expansion of this to include uploading files etc.

Added updates and tweaks per JT to the vol 21 material, and updated the website in parallel (more to do there); also noticed some ugliness in the rendering of long URLs, so spent some time working on insertion of zero-width no-breaks in appropriate places, rather than between all characters, as we were doing before. This seems to work much better.

On late duty.

TEI ticket work and some journal drudgery.

Fixed a bug I'd introduced (fancy non-XSLT-1 XPath), and a couple of others I'd missed (namespaces). Pages are now working OK, but the HTML5 output is not valid because of tags taht should be self-closing but aren't. Still trying to figure this one out.

I've now finished a test version of how I think we should handle long documents, with Stow 1598 as a model. This is how it works:

There is an <abstract> element in the header, which should contain a very short (one- or two-sentence) introduction to the text, followed by a modern editorial table-of-contents.

When you go to the Stow document with its "pure" filename, you see the content of the <abstract>. The very brief introduction can/should contain links to a full critical introduction to the text, which would be encoded as a separate file; we don't want to entangle the critical stuff with the primary source stuff, as we've previously discussed.

The table of contents from the abstract appears as a series of links. If you click on a link, you go to a the appropriate section of the document -- so if you click on "Wall about the City", you go to that section, which consists of pp. 6-10 in Stow page-numbers, or 15 to 19 in "real" page numbers (counting from the beginning without errors).

When you're looking at a section like this, you have three navigation buttons: previous section, back to "index" (abstract), and next section. In addition to navigating from section to section, you can jump direct to a page number (based on an actual page number as it shows in Stow), using the pageNum parameter, and you can jump to a mechanical page number -- Stow's page 10 above is actually the 19th page in the book -- using pbFirst.

In either case, you can page forwards or backwards through the document with the buttons at the top and bottom of the page.

Finally, you can view a page-range by using both pbFirst and pbLast:

pbFirst=19&pbLast=23

?sectionNum=12#stow_1598_orders_and_customs

I think this is pretty comprehensive. It provides an easy starting point for browsing the document, and gives us lots of ways to point to specific locations in the document (from critical intros and other modern ancillary texts), while preserving the integrity of the original text and its page formats. At the same time, it preserves the server from the unwanted load of rendering the whole document in one go.

I've also fixed all the issues highlighted in Janelle's docx file listing the TOC components. Waiting for team approval before porting from dev to live.

Under pressure to show stuff to new hires, rustled up dev and live versions of the new db, and did a couple of tweaks to the Windows ImageMagick script. Turns out the parameter error I'm seeing on some machines is a result of ImageMagick not being installed -- it then defaults to the "convert" command the system uses for something else entirely. Must trap that error better.

Also discussed data collection and processing tools with the new hires, and did some research into ArcGIS, which the GIS folks want to use.

Leaving early for an appointment.