Politarchopolis Hierophant

The process I’m using to update events is awfully laborious: I’m hand-editing the database by moving ones and zeroes around with tweezers, pretty much.  I really want to fix the event database by chopping it out and replacing it with XML files.  Some features it needs:

• Right now we can identify events as singular, weekly or monthly, with flexibility for stuff like “every second week on a Tuesday” or “the last Wednesday of the month”.  It needs to also be able to specify exceptions, as in: every Wednesday except when the baronial meeting is on” or similar.
• The space for event details is pretty sparse.  I’d like to be able to put more information in, possibly including pictures, bloggy style.
• Every event has a time, but I don’t have facility for including that except as plain text.  It would need to be a list (armour inspection 1pm, tourney 2pm, hall opens 5.30pm, etc).
• Ditto with prices, including member/non-member and so on.
• Ditto with bookings: required/preferred/none, bookings officer, policy for cancellations and blow-ins.
• We have links to Google Maps, but they could be inlined in the main page.
• I don’t need a web form for editing, but some sort of pre-publication preview would be useful.

I’ve been away from this particular blog and the Hierophant job for a while, as you may have noticed. Here’s a slightly blurry picture of the reason why:

I’m more or less back now, though, and I’ve hit upon a plan. It has two parts:

1. I still want a deputy. I’ll remove the existing Politarchopolis site and replace it with something underpowered but easy to maintain if I can’t find a competent PHP programmer, and then any old muggins will be able to look after it. Obviously I’d rather find someone competent, but that’s looking implausible.

2. I will set aside an hour a week, generally on Sunday evening, to do website stuff. It should be all it needs. Giving it a regular time slot makes it a little easier to convince my Beloved to look after the munchkins while I work, and means that nobody is going to need to be disappointed if things don’t get updated according to their whims, because it’s my whims that are the relevant factor.

If we’re happy with that, I’ll get to it. I’ve already put up the last four Griffintayles, which I only just got today from the B&B. Tomorrow night I’ll put up links to these officer blogs, so people can start finding them and (I hope!) officers can start using them.

As always, I’m looking for people who can take event details, condense them to the essentials, and email me the condensed version. The biggest chore in this job is wading through reams of long-winded and florid woffle to extract the sense of an announcement. It’s why a bunch of events never got advertised: I just didn’t feel up to it, with an exhausted pregnant wife and a lot of other work on my plate. If someone — anyone, anywhere — would do the editing for me, the site would be a thing of wonder. Think about that the next time you feel like complaining, OK?

The blogs we have so far on personal.flurf.net for Politarchopolis baronial officers:

• Seneschal: Owain Cantor ap Hughe
• Hierophant: Karl Faustus von Aachen (me!)
• Baron and Baroness: Alessandro von Florenz and Isobel le Bretoun
• Lists: Seraphina le Dauncer
• Deputy Hierophant for Content: Ysambart Courtain
• Marshal: Cornelius von Becke

More as they sign up!

The Interweb is a clever thingy. With a moment’s effort to install (and infinite time to tweak, twiddle and adjust) I can put some powerful blogging software up on a site, and then anyone can sign up, log in and speak out. If you’re a member of either or both of the two eligible groups, a Politarchopolis baronial officer or just a friend of mine, that’s all you need to join in. Crispin “Crunch” Harris has already done it, as has Baronial Seneschal Owain Cantor ap Hughe. Why not be one of the super l33t cool kidz too?

The first thing you’ll need to do is read the articles on personal.flurf.net to tell you what this is for and how you can get involved. They’re aimed at friends as well as officers (perhaps you qualify under both headings!) so read with that in mind. There will be articles here at /hierophant specifically aimed at officers, talking about stuff like reporting requirements. I’ll provide pointers here to other articles so you won’t miss anything if you just follow this blog; no sense in making it painful.