[Artemisia] Igor! Throw the switch!

[El Hermoso Dormiendo]

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FFFzzzzzzZZZzzTT!!!!!!!!!

It lives!

Before I get to the rest of this message, I want to give a BIG thanks
to everyone who has been reporting missing and mis-spelled names and such.

THANKS!  Please continue!

You may remember me as the guy who occasionally posts about cool stuff he
wants to do with the Artemisian OP.  Surely, many of you must have been
thinking "Yeah, right, call me when you actually DO something." (Even if you 
were all too courteous to SAY it). 

Well, I finally found some of that mysterious 'free time' stuff that I've
heard so much about and managed to get a few things done.

First - if you have a modern, properly-configured browser, information from 
the OP site will be sent over in a compressed form.  It doesn't look any
different, but should load about 3-5 times faster than before.  If you're
browser's too obsolete, or something isn't configured properly (or your
Internet Service Provider has you using a web 'proxy' that interferes) 
don't worry - you won't see any speed increase, but everything will still
work as before.

Second - Minor change in the way people's individual records appear.  Awards 
are now sorted in "bigness" order rather than as a 'history' of awards.
Mistress Shauna had actually been asking for this one for a while, and I'd
been procrastinating in hopes of having time to devise a 'clean' way to 
toggle between the two (or to combine both ways of display somehow), but 
over Thanksgiving she was in a situation where she needed it, so I went
ahead and just changed it. The dates now also show in plain language rather
than "sortable-in-a-spreadsheet" format (YYYY-MM-DD).  (PERSONALLY, I prefer
the previous sorting order, as it showed a sort of history of a person's
activities, but it appears that the way it is now is the traditional form.  I
intend to revisit this at some point and put in a button that can switch
between the two forms, or something of the sort.)

Third - One of the "I'm going to do this someday" features is now actually
working: I've just finished putting in the infrastructure to support
handling 'aliases' for names.  Right now there are only a couple of entries
in there, but more are expected to follow as I learn about them.  Try
putting in "Therasia" in the search box and click "find persona names" to see
an example.  I will also be adding a aliases for awards (i.e. so you can
find all of those "Sable blahblahblah" awards that are now "Golden
blahblahblah", and so on).

Fourth - Another "I'm going to do this someday" feature is also now
working.  There is now an OP "report generator" which you can use to
get OP information for any combination of one or more 'local groups', 
in three different kinds of report, each of which can be had in three
different data formats.

The three types of reports are:
1)A "Short" OP Listing (like the regular OP, though without the links).
2)A "Short" alphabetical listing by Persona name.
3)A "Long" report, in Alphabetical order by persona name, but showing all
awards in the database for each persona.

The three formats are:
1)HTML - that is, a regular web page.
2)Text - Plain old text, readable on a PDA or "Notepad" or whatever
3)"CSV" - Text as "Comma Separated Values".  This format is importable into
just about any spreadsheet program (OpenOffice Calc, Microsoft Excel, Etc.
etc.)

These last two features might also be helpful in my getting this backlog
of missing and/or incorrect names resolved.  The latter might be useful for
heralds and others in various local groups to get a listing of everyone in
their area that the OP database knows about, and more easily spot who's
missing.  And as the Kingdom OP data gets to the point of being correct
enough, the latter 'report' feature could be used to generate OP listings
for local group websites, if desired.

And, of course, the 'aliases' feature can help me find the correct records
for the 'short names' that often appear on court report forms, at least as
it gets 'filled in'.  Please feel free to send me more of them, either 'old'
names that people have changed, or famous 'nicknames' (Who's "Fluffy",
again?...)

Of course, this wouldn't be a REAL message about the OP if I didn't
include some "vaporware" features as well, so here are some that I'll
be working on "Real Soon Now", as the OP continues its unstoppable expansion
into a full-fledged Registry Of Doom:

1)College of Artemisia information - actually this one should be relatively
soon, possibly during the holidays.  I primarily need to get back on touch
with Herr Braden whose idea it was, and finish hashing out the technical 
details, and getting the raw data to put in.

2)Armorial stuff.  No, really.  Any day now.  Honest....

3)Various other little tweaks and improvements

And, as always, comments, suggestions, and requests are welcome.  Thanks, all!

signed,
El Hermoso Dormiendo, differently sane
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