Today audited and consolidated source records, and then implemented new scheme tags, to handle the numerous variant title fields, which until now have not been posted. These include subtitles for TV series episodes, alternate UK or US or Australian titles, comments on titles (the fact that Harlan Ellison’s 1977 Nebula Dramatic Presentation nomination was a recording, for example), and even a handful of dual titles that were nominated or won awards, such as Bradley Denton’s win in the 1995 World Fantasy Awards (collection) for a pair of titles. Rebuilding all awards pages now… will be posted later this evening or more likely tomorrow. Name pages later this weekend.

Later, 10pm PDT: 2500 award listings pages zipped, uploaded, and unzipped, just now.

Last night: completed Google-searching and compiling covers for every single Hugo nominated novel. And installed, you can see them now. Next: Nebula and Locus.

Today, began thorough auditing and implementation of exceptions in the award source records to the default formatting done so far on the awards listings pages. For example, cases where within an award category there are first place, second place, and so on, as in the Writers of the Future and Rhysling awards. As well as other tags, indicating award won but declined, nomination deleted, and so on. These have been implemented but are not yet posted…

I should mention that the new site is being built from scratch, using the same tools (MS Access databases that generated static webpages, though now using php), but with fresh visual basic code, queries, macros, etc. The code in the database for the old site grew like one of those houses that just kept adding rooms, and got very inefficient; the new databases, plural, are more modular (object oriented) and easily maintained.

These posts are only secondarily to inform anyone reading this – the handful of invited previewers – about my progress; mainly, I’m setting up a series of posts so I can adjust WordPress to set up archive pages and so on. The intent is to use WP to display the latest one or two updates on the homepage — the more modular database implementation will make it easy to keep the site updated weekly, say — and to display older posts on archive pages. These early development posts will be deleted, eventually…

Took the afternoon off and spent four hours scanning, mostly, missing covers from Hugo-nominated novels, after which I re-assembled and rebuilt the Hugo pages, a few minutes ago. I already had most covers since 1988 or 1989 or so — since I’ve been posting new books pages on Locus Online — but before that, I had nothing. Searching Amazon.com and Google images works intermittently, but it’s been faster simply to scan books I have in my library, which is most first editions back to the early 1970s, and rely on web searches in those few cases (about 10 titles over 20 years) where I’d not bought, or had sold, first edition copies. For those I did scan today (and earlier), I’ve saved large scans, at height 1000 pixels. Not sure what I’ll do with those… perhaps link them in somehow. A few Hugo covers remain to be collected…. I plan to install covers for as many of the ‘major’ awards as I can, before launching this site publicly.

13,120 pages rebuilt last night and this morning – actually, 13,120 files, since some are menu files that are included in other pages rather than appearing individually. Still, there are only about 100 of those (one for each award), and so the site has right about 13,000 viewable pages.

Ideally, every one of those pages is accessible from the home page — or any other page — via two clicks, with no scrolling, using the drop-down menus and then the menus on each page. Though perhaps some of the longer Names directory pages might require a bit of scrolling on a small monitor…

All listings and name pages rebuilt yesterday, and uploaded by this morning, with updated data through July 2012. Still numerous formatting and layout tweaks to make before site goes live.