Politarchopolis Hierophant

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.

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.

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 running commentary of news on the missing awards:

• I sent out a request to all current and former barons and baronesses of Politarchopolis (CCed to the seneschal and herald), asking for their help in patching holes in the awards database.  Interesting statistics: we only have 5 awards listed from the whole of 2005, and none since!
• Leta replied to say that she’s been meaning to write up her paper records of this, and will try to do so this week.
• Owain gave me the list of awards he and Quataryna have received, but I’ll leave that aside for now in the hopes that updates from the B&Bs will make it redundant.

More as it comes in.

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.

The website tracks the baronial awards given by our past and present barons and baronesses. Unfortunately, it’s out of date: Leta and Edmund dropped out of the SCA for a while after they stepped down (this is fairly normal - you spend some time as landed B&B and you’ll deserve a break too!) and didn’t give me a list of the awards they’d given. Thus, with a few exceptions, there’s nothing in there since the reign of Francois and Aelfthrythe.

So: if you’re a past or present baron or baroness, please get in touch with whatever information you can give me about awards you’ve presented to people. Alternatively, if you’ve received an award within the barony, please let me know the award and the date you got it.

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.

Recent changes:

• Added a link to the officers’ blogs from the main page and the mailing list. Added two new blogs so far (Rapier Marshal and Constable).
• Added Griffintayles for January 2008, November/December 2007, October 2007 and September 2007.
• Added event notices for Target Archery Weekend and Sunday Baronial Planning Meeting.
• Got a deputy! Honore will help out by taking event notices and condensing them to fit on the event notices page. Bart very kindly agreed to step aside in favour of Honore, since he had an attack of life too and couldn’t get anything done.

To do this coming Sunday:

• Update officers’ details for A&S officer and deputy.
• Change how event notices work so that we can fit more information in. Also change the display to include full information (there’s a section that doesn’t display the location links for some reason).
• Add a form to make it easy for event stewards to fill in the right information without excess verbiage.
• Fix some display bugs in Internet Explorer 6 - Deferred: only applies to blogs; will require software upgrade.

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?

Coming soon on the Polit site: a rearrangement of how SCA events are handled internally.  It won’t have any effect on the display, which I’m fairly happy with, but it will make it possible for other officers (the B&B mainly) to edit events without needing database access.  This is my #1 priority on the Polit site, but mundane work may trump it in the near future.  In the mean time, make sure I have the latest info about every event and I’ll update it manually.