News from Anselm Lingnau

Anselm Lingnau

I didn't mention it before but since yesterday we're officially at MiniCribs 25.06. Thanks to Keith Rose for pointing out an error in the importer routine.

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 14 August 2015 23:59

Anselm Lingnau

MiniCribs in the Strathspey SCD Database are now up to version 25.05!

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 15 June 2015 13:41

Anselm Lingnau

“Activity flags” for Person records in the database (i.e., whether somebody is a dance author, publisher, tune composer, or recording musician) are now set automatically according to the content of the database (i.e., a person counts as a dance author if and only if there are dances in the database that are credited to them). This is intended to avoid problems where editors add people to the database without checking the appropriate boxes, which means that the corresponding tabs on the person's detail page will not be active.

This is more subtle than it seems because we need to take into account that someone can be a dance author by virtue of being part of a group of people (with a separate database entry) who co-devised a dance (and so on for the other entry types).

The activity flags for all Person entries in the database are updated once a day (night, really). For the time being, activity flags can still be set manually on a person's entry in the administration UI, but will be overwritten on the next update.

As a fringe benefit, it is now possible to edit group membership information in the administration UI. This functionality has been long overdue and is now finally available.

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 14 March 2015 19:32 (last edited on 14 March 2015 19:34)

Anselm Lingnau

MiniCribs in the Strathspey SCD DB are now up to version 25.03.

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 3 March 2015 9:49

Anselm Lingnau

The database now has the current version of MiniCribs. There were some minor problems with the update process that needed to be sorted out, most of which had to do with the Django 1.7 update, and that resulted in a fairly long delay. But I hope that future updates will proceed a lot faster!

The automated import process manages to connect approximately 97% of the 4500+ cribs to the corresponding dances in the database. The vast majority of the remaining cribs belongs to dances that we don't yet have in the database; we're working on getting these added, and at that point they will hopefully also be imported correctly.

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 13 February 2015 14:37 (last edited on 13 February 2015 14:38)

Anselm Lingnau

Just secured the domain name “scd.club”. This means that I'm now in a position to offer free domain registrations of the form “XYZ.scd.club” if anyone is interested.

I'm probably going to add “frankfurt.scd.club” as an alias of “www.frankfurt-scd-club.org” just for kicks.

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 4 February 2015 12:10

Anselm Lingnau

Videos for dance lists are back! In the Strathspey SCD Database, You can now select the “Videos” tab on a dance list detail page and see videos for all the dances that have them.

Generally, the video shown for a dance is the one with the highest quality level. If there are several videos at the highest quality level for that dance (e.g., several “Good” ones when no “Demonstration quality” video exists) then one of those is chosen at random.

Eventually we want to introduce an “Editor's Pick” badge where we explicitly designate one of the available videos as the preferred one to be used in contexts like the dance list “Videos” tab.

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 1 February 2015 15:50

Anselm Lingnau

There appears to have been an outage of the Strathspey (web) Server earlier today, which I am unfortunately not in a position to investigate in detail (being in Portugal and all that). I restarted the web server and it appears to run, and we should all keep our fingers crossed that it will continue for the next few days because I don't really know if and when I'm going to be online.

(Before you ask: I used to have an automatic check that would advise me if the server was down, but my mobile phone data plan doesn't work outside Germany, and the infrastructure in question wasn't quite carried across to the new server machine in the first place. I'm going to look into crash-proofing the server better when I'm home after next Sunday.)

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 8 December 2014 1:38

Anselm Lingnau

Dance lists in the database now are no longer automatically made “active” when they are edited. Instead there is a “Make List Active” button near the “Edit List” button on a list's detail page which you can use to make a list active.

The “active” list is the one that gets dances added to it via the “Add to List” button on a dance's detail page. If you create a new list that list is still implicitly made active; the only change is that editing a list doesn't make that list active.

The reason for the change is that I'm looking through previous class logs to find dances for our upcoming ball – which if the ball list is active is easy because you can click on a dance and from its detail page add it to that list. However, if for any reason you edit a previous class log (e.g., to make it public) then that list used to become active, so you had to go back to the ball list to make that active again, etc., which was annoying.

Note that you can edit a list whether or not it is active, so you don't need to make it active just to edit it. Also note that you don't need to explicitly make list A inactive before making list B active.

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 24 November 2014 14:39

Anselm Lingnau

The update seems to have gone through OK – it was a bigger job than originally planned but the system is now in as good a shape as it ever was.

We're also just half an hour of programming and a 2-hour import run of nearly 70.000 messages away from getting the Strathspey Archive back on track. There are a few loose ends to be tied up (e.g., dealing with the address rewriting that the nasty AOL/Yahoo! DMARC business inflicted on us earlier this year), but I'm quite positive it won't be long now. This goes hand in hand with an updated version of www.strathspey.org, which means I get to finally get rid of the previous version of the framework. Yay!

As always, if you find any anomalies or have other questions, suggestions, or criticism then do let me know.

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 20 November 2014 1:59