I devoted some time this week to preparing for my Performance and Development Review, as it’s that time of year again.  This involved going through all of my blog posts for the past year and picking out my main accomplishments then writing the necessary sections of the PDR documentation.

Also this week I continued to work on the old STELLA apps.  I’d contacted the app people in IT Services on Monday and someone got back to me later in the week, although I’m still not certain whether we will be able to relaunch the resources as iOS and Android apps.  We would have to commit to releasing updated versions of the apps at least once a year, and as these resources are reference works for subjects that don’t exactly change much (Old English, English grammar) releasing regular updates isn’t going to be particularly suitable.  I’ll need to have a think about this, as it might be better if we just release updated web-based resources instead.

I focussed for some of this week on creating a new interface for the oldest of the STELLA apps: Readings in Early English.  I created this more than a decade ago and an update is long overdue (currently the old version can be accessed here: https://stella.glasgow.ac.uk/readings/).  I created a potential new interface for the resource this week, although I still have to add in all of the content and try out some alternatives so there’s still lots to be done.

Other than these things I had an email conversation with Thomas Clancy about another place-name project that wanted some advice on developing online resources.  I also fixed a bug in the new map interface for place-names.  When viewing a restricted set of place-names (e.g. as the result of a search or browse) and then pressing on a cross-reference link in a place-name pop-up, if the place-name labels are set to ‘always on’ and the cross-referenced place-name is not in the restricted set of names currently visible then the full dataset will be loaded into the map.  When this happens the ‘always on’ labels should be reset of ‘off’ as having a map with thousands of ‘always on’ labels slows the interface to a crawl and is impossible to navigate.  However, although the labels option in the menu is reset to ‘hover only’ the labels were continuing to be displayed.  This isn’t a major bug as clearly it only triggers in very specific circumstances, but I wanted to sort it and thankfully I was able to, updating the code on both the Iona and Ayr websites (the maps are not yet publicly available on either of these resources).  I also updated the Ayr resource to add in a ‘Loading’ spinner when the data first loads in.  The initial load can take several seconds, during which it looks like the resource is just an empty map, so having a ‘Loading’ spinner on a greyed out map makes it clearer that something is actually happening.  The initial load takes so long because of the parish boundary GeoJSON data rather than the place-name markers themselves.  The parish boundary data is pretty large so takes some time to pull in.

Also this week I gave some advice to the researcher in charge of the Robert Fergusson website, had a chat with Geert of the AND about future AND work, watched some videos from a recent team meeting that Rhona of the DSL sent to me and resent the staff credentials for the new Speak For Yersel resources to Mary.

Also this week the old Italian Emblems website (https://www.italianemblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/) was finally reinstated after some recent reworking of it.