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.

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.

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…

A couple of notes to show that I’m not asleep:

• I put the wrong start date in the calendar for the Baronial Meeting. It doesn’t start until the last Wednesday of next month, not this month. Fixed now. If you were planning to show up to Copland G030 at the ANU tonight for the meeting, nobody will be there. The actual venue won’t be known until the Baron and Baroness get back from Canterbury Faire in NZ and can negotiate a new year’s deal with the ANU for a meeting room.
• I’m working on the events design I wrote about in my last post. Currently I’m trudging through the date-specification logic, reusing as much of my old code as I can but adding new capabilities. This morning’s achievement: it handles exceptions, so I can tell it something like “last Wednesday of the month, except January” and it knows what I mean. The specification is solid and I don’t think there are any remaining hurdles; I just need a couple more days to get it running.
• My Deputy had an attack of life, as is traditional when you take on any SCA office but especially this one for some reason. She pinged me yesterday to say she’s recovered now and will be at work on content improvement shortly.
• Most officers aren’t using their blogs, I notice. I’ll have a chat with some of them privately to find out what I can do to help, and also with the Seneschal to see how he’d like to see reporting improved generally. I must admit it would be nice to see some snaps of the B&B’s trip to the eastern states on their blog, so we can go ooh and aah over pictures of sheep and gorse bushes and exceptionally well-dressed Lochacians with funny accents.

Was updating the database of events, but the SCA website seems to have crashed.  Poot.  I shall wait and see if Del gives it a kick.

Things I did:

• Corrected errors in regular events.
• Added in the upcoming events we know about so far.
• Added Rowany Festival and Canterbury Faire (but it crashed while I was saving that, so I’ll wait and see if I can re-post later).

To do:

• Check that the officers’ details are right.
•  Put the Politarchopolis Roll information form on the site, so people can be added to a roll of the general populace.

A small update this Sunday, I think:

• Owain has sent me the info for a couple of events. I need to chase some details, but they can go into the events page pretty much as-is.
• He suggests going through the latest Griffintayle to grab other events. I shall get my lovely deputy to do this, if she’s over her bubonic measlepox.
• The officers’ list may need similar updating, although I think it’s pretty close already.
• He suggested putting out a call on the Polit list and the front page of the site for people to notify me of the awards they’ve received that aren’t on the list. I think it would make sense to check with Leta, Edmund, Isobel and Alessandro first, to avoid duplication of effort.

Apart from that, I hope to get some time to expand out the events page. Events really should have their own pages, ideally of the form http://sca.org.au/politarchopolis/event/st-valentine rather than the current cryptic id-number system. I can get that working pretty simply, but it’ll remain low priority for now if I get other jobs like the ones listed.

This week’s work:

• Added links to the disturbingly popular “Speaking Forsoothly” on the A&S page.
• Sorted the gallery in alphabetical order.
• Added some attributions to images.
• Added new A&S minister and deputy.
• Added new Deputy Hierophant.
• Added link to Joanna’s dance schedule.
• Partially fixed display of events to include location in the daily view screen.
• Added event steward notification form, which sends information direct to Deputy Hierophant.

Site is now pretty well up to date. I do have some photos from Alexandra Hartshorn that I need to find and upload, but apart from that it’s all pretty much right. My new deputy has come down with the plague, as is traditional for my deputies (Bart nearly died!) so if you want to notify me of events, feel free to use the Event Steward Notification Form.