Politarchopolis Hierophant

Keep meaning to do this, but it’s always right before the baronial meeting that I actually do.  Ah well; I bask in the knowledge that other baronial officers are also slack buggers and if my beloved Seneschal decides to have all of us executed for uselessness, at least the guillotine platform won’t be a lonely place.  Well, not at first.

Big news: the Polit site went down for a while after Del did his big upgrade to PHP5.  My fault for trusting that he’d just install all the old settings unchanged on the new server; I think PHP annoys him and he traditionally doesn’t like tweaking the default settings, so everything went splat.  The nasty coincidence was that my Ubuntu laptop was going through troubles of its own that I could only fix by upgrading to the latest edition, and they stopped me doing any uploading to the site even after I found the problem.  I fixed it eventually, but it was a boring couple of weeks for fans of the site.

Other big news: I’ve lost another deputy to higher duties before I even got her going on deputy stuff.  Lady Honore de Corbeau (that’s “blackbird’s honour” in French — why???) is now Pegasus chronicler, so I’ve released her from her non-existent duties as my deputy.  Meanwhile, my former deputy Cortain is now baronial chronicler.  I sense a pattern here.  Does S. Aldhelm’s need me to a groom a chronicler for them too?  Apply to the usual address.

Del’s upgrade theoretically means I can move the baronial officers blogs off personal.flurf.net  and only sca.org.au/politarchopolis, but this will take some thought and experimentation.  I’m working on installing WordPress MU on my own primary site right now, and when that’s working and tested I’ll do the same for the Polit site.  With luck, this will make administration of the rest of the Polit site much easier for anyone who follows me in the Hierophantic occupation.  But it’s a ways off yet.

Owain is receiving spam via the contact form; I’ll fix that the way I did for the Award Recommendations form on Canon Lore: automatically discard any messages containing HTML of the sort that spammers use, such as the <a href…> element.

Mailing list is uneventful.  I got to trample one mini-flamewar, but I don’t think anyone noticed.  Flaming is harder on reply-to-sender lists than it is on reply-to-list lists like the Shambles.

I have a few site updates to do — putting in some new officers’ details, mainly — and I would love to update event information in our calendar, except that I don’t have any information.  I’ll trawl the mailing lists archives, but I’m pretty sure the rest of the year is just going to be a quiet one for the barony.

I wouldn’t mind stepping down from the job some time, but there’s no rush.  If the seneschal hasn’t sacked me yet, he probably never will, so I’ll just keep muddling along.

And that, such as it is, is my report.

The Polit site is back, freshly updated for PHP version 5 on the new sca.org.au servers.  It was a tough assignment!  Let me know if there are any problems, but I believe it will be fully functional, although there may be problems with the mail functionality, so you may not be able to send emails via the contacts page.  Not sure about that; it could just be slow.  We’ll see how it looks in the morning.

You will have noticed by now that the Polit website is down.  Del (the sca.org.au server owner) mentioned a while back that he’d be upgrading the servers to use a new version of PHP, so I researched the particular functions that my sites use and thought it wouldn’t be a problem.  Unfortunately, one of the function libraries that the Polit site relies on was made optional between the old and new versions of the underlying server software, and it didn’t occur to me that Del wouldn’t install it as a matter of course.  As a bonus, some weirdnesses in my own computer’s setup made it impossible for me to perform the same upgrade until just last weekend, so I couldn’t test my assumptions even if I’d known I had to.  Sigh.  I am currently rewriting the part of the site that needs to change.  I hope to have it working before the end of this coming week, family and work permitting.

Invisible Bugfix

I finally got around to fixing a bug in the website that’s been there for ages. Briefly: there’s an internal list of upcoming events, a version of which you can read at the Events page, and naturally it contains one entry for each event, a bit like rows in a spreadsheet. But my web software, which sits in the background converting these internal lists to their final pretty format whenever someone clicks a link, didn’t know how to weed out events that had already passed. This meant I had to go in periodically and delete lines from the internal list, or else it’d be mid-October and you’d still be reading about Rowany Festival “coming soon” at Easter. Today, sitting in a laundromat waiting for five loads of washing, I programmed in the missing logic, so now events that have already passed will be chopped out of the list.

I’ve also recently redone the Contacts list (known to old farts as the Regnum). It’s laid out better now, and should be easier to skim-read to find what you’re looking for. I’m thinking of sticking little portraits of the officers on there, which might be cute, or it might be more hassle than its worth to maintain. What do you think?

New Content

At the request of the baronial meeting, I hunted down a document I wrote ages ago on how to run a feast. We used to have a dauntingly exhaustive instruction on that topic, but I’m sure it scared off more prospective Stewards than it encouraged; my version is shorter, simpler, and less likely to send you screaming for the hills, so I think it’s a win for our side. Have a look and tell me what you think; suggestions are always welcome.

As well as that, I’d love for someone to do the equivalent “How To” from a Head Cook’s point of view. If you’ve been what they used to call a Feastocrat, and you fancy sharing your wisdom, whether hard-earned or otherwise, drop me a line and we’ll work something out to get you a wider audience.

Not much news here, because things are ticking along without much change.  Mathilde Hastings has the new College website up, and it’s looking good.  My lovely Deputy Hierophant (Content) hasn’t produced any content yet, but I’m putting together a list of stuff that might be good, including a dump of what used to be on the old Polit site, so she can wade through it and produce some shiny new stuff.

I should start looking for someone to take this job over, because I need to divest myself of some responsibilities.  It’s not a big job for anyone who can find their way around an XML editor (even a text editor, in a pinch) because it’s all pretty automated and simple: you want to add events to the schedule, stick them in the schedules directory; add a news item in the news directory; edit content using the content.xml file, edit the navigation links using the nav.xml file; and so on.  One quick script to upload the lot to the server, and anyone could do it - although it’s easier if you know enough to set up Apache and a few other geek tools on your own computer so you can test stuff before it gets published.  So if anyone wants to take over as Hierophant any time, let me know.  It’s not urgent, since it really is pretty easy, so I can keep doing it for a while, but I should share the fun…

That’s about it, really.  No news is good news.  Contact me if there’s any content you’d like to see on the site, or if you have suggestions.  My email address is bat@flurf.net.

This week’s update will be postponed.  I spent large amounts of today soothing a very grumptious Boy Wonder, and I am now too knackered to code.  I did succeed in getting a program called ftpsync to work on my Linux laptop, so now I can upload changes to the baronial website with a single command, so that’s something at least; but any more than that will have to wait until tomorrow.  Apologies to anyone who’s waiting with bated breath; stay blue in the face one more day and then you can exhale.

Matters arising from the baronial meeting, in no particular order:

• The “Visual” mode for editing blog entries is a bit flakey at times. See if I can find a plugin that works better than the default.
• Upgrade WordPress to the latest version.
• Meetings this year will be at the School of Music. Get a map, and pop in to take photos so we can show people where to go, because the levels and floors of the SoM are as insane as the people running the place.
• Extra field for officers table: link to their blog
• Allow non-officers to have entries in the officers table; make that the standard way to contact stewards and bookings people.
• Contact all the officers to ensure the addresses are right.
• Automate the process of contacting officers, so I can do it by typing a password and clicking Send.
• Get permission from officers to publish their email addresses on the site.
• Ditto for publishing addresses in Griffintayle.
• Come up with a better way to do the web-vs-emailed Griffintayle, so Thanatos doesn’t have to do two copies each time.
• There’s an event, presumably either Valhalla or Casual War, at Warrambui on November 20-23 or thereabouts.
• The March baronial meeting will be the first Wednesday of April; after that it goes back to every last Wednesday.
• Add the ability to “move” dates in the exceptions section of an event specification.
• Talk to other web ministers about calendar coordination. Ideal solution: everyone maintains their own calendars the same way, but they can all be viewed from a central location. Work on a good spec; figure out how to deal with web ministers who don’t know how to program (ie the ones who aren’t qualified to do the job).
• Blog for College Seneschal.
• Blog for Captain of Archers.
• Blog for Herald.

… Plus the stuff from my previous entry. Busy Sunday!

The changed site is uploaded and live! And I sent an actual real live officer’s report to my kingdom superior! Gods I’m good!

Still to do:

• Add in some more events - now a much easier job! They’re all there now, although frequently without much in the way of details.
• New: Tell it not to display events that have already happened!
• Do the same database-to-XML conversion for the last remaining table, the officers list. I’ve already got the XML; just have to change the script that lists the officers.
• Delete the now-redundant database tables.
• Chase up Baroness Leta (again!) to get award information.
• And that’s all! Anything else can wait until people actually ask for it.

Very close to finishing the events code and uploading it.  It needs only two things: the main events page that lists all the upcoming events, and some editing of the actual events to include some details that weren’t included in the original database.  However, family matters took precedence today and, while I got a fair bit done, it’s not ready for upload yet.

So: tomorrow, possibly on the bus to work, I’ll forego watching the latest Torchwood and instead add the missing bits.  I’ll upload the lot as soon as I can, including the latest Griffintayle.  And  then, with that all sorted and some actual achievements under my belt, I’ll send my first actual proper officer’s report to the kingdom web minister, CCing the seneschal.

But that’s tomorrow (well, later today really…).  Right now, I have important sleeping to do.

The code to handle events is looking pretty good now.  I’ve got it fitting events into the calendar properly, just the way it used to do with the database-backed version, only now it’s reading the events from XML files and allowing for many more options.  Looking at my recent wishlist entry-cum-specification, I can report that events can now be specified with date exceptions, the summary and description now allow HTML, the times and prices can be specified in detail, and the embedded Google Maps work perfectly.  The only thing left is the booking details, which will also require a carefully-crafted “Politarchopolan Bookings Policy”, which I’ll write based on the Lionheart Company policy and run past the Seneschal for approval before it goes live.

So: although the site seems not to have changed much in the last two weeks, I have very definitely been putting in my hour a week and then some (more like a dozen hours this week and about the same last week) and it’s all about to bear fruit.

Now… where’s that deputy with her content updates?  I shall have to get her working on putting all the existing events in this new format…