As predicted in an earlier post, I discovered a flaw in the site last night — there was no Titles page for China Miéville -! — that I investigated and fixed today. It had to do with the difference between what I call ‘display’ names and ‘index’ names, where the latter, which become URLs, cannot include special characters such as the letter E with an acute on it, because browsers, or perhaps servers, reject URLs with such characters. And, my query to sum the number of titles for each author, which determines whether or not the author gets a separate titles page, was run before the query to align each award record with the ‘index’ name. Make sense? Anyway, fixed the problem. It affected 17 authors, including China. Those 17 authors’ name pages, and the name directories pages, updated.

Today’s update: Aurora awards winners from last night. Six awards pages and 19 name pages updated.

Found two pervasive issues last night that needed fixing, and they affected so many pages it was simpler today to rebuild all of them rather than try to tag and keep track of which ones needed to be corrected. So every page (well, except for the name directory pages and the awards directory page) should now bear an August 10th update date.

Tempted to ‘launch’ the site any day now, even knowing there is bound to be some format or layout issue that I will embarrassed for people to have seen before I can correct it. On the other hand, there are always such refinements to make. And, the new site does have updated awards listings and nominee indexes… whereas the previous site hasn’t been updated since last November….

In the past couple days: added Mythopoeic, Carl Brandon, and World Fantasy Award data. Tweaked fonts and layouts here and there. Split several Name Directory pages (increasing the total in the drop-down) so no one page is too long – ideally keeping to the two clicks with no scrolling goal for site navigation.

And… rebuilt all 13,000 pages with various tweaks incorporated, and the tag to block search engines removed. Those were uploaded by this morning.

Now trying to initialize Google search so it produces results… and, tweaking WordPress. Ideally would like latest post on the homepage, and all others hidden in archives, with one archive per month. But WP, it seems, applies the number of posts on the homepage to be the same on an archive page, which isn’t what I want.. Still experimenting with this.

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.