I was back at work on Monday this week after being on holiday the week before.  Whilst I was away the external hosting company where many of our sites are now hosted performed a major upgrade to the default PHP version our sites run on, from 7.X to 8.X.  I hadn’t been given an advanced warning of this significant update and unfortunately when it took effect many of our websites stopped working, and the first I was aware of this was when people started sending me frantic emails.  Thankfully I was checking my emails whilst I was away and I spent a bit of my holiday manually reverting the sites back to 7.X, a temporary measure that got the sites up and running again.

On my return to work I spent all of Monday going through every site in order to upgrade any parts of the code that were causing problems with PHP 8.  I had to go through 24 sites, but thankfully in most cases it was the same issue that was causing problems each time, and once identified it was relatively easy to fix.  By the end of the day all of the sites were working properly with PHP 8.X, which was a relief.

The Anglo-Norman Dictionary people had also alerted me to an issue with the dictionary management system whilst I was away too.  When editing entries any language tags were being lost, not from the XML itself, but the entries were no longer being picked up by the language search facility.  I spent a bit of time investigating what was going on here.  When a new or edited entry is published search terms such as language tags are extracted from the entry’s XML.  When I created the new language tag system a few months ago I first applied it to the batch processing scripts that handle an entire batch of entries and once this was tested and working I then I copied the code into the script that handles the publication of entries via the holding area in the DMS.

In each script the extraction of language tags only applies to ‘main’ entries rather than xref entries and there’s a check to ensure the XML file in question is the correct type.  In the batch processing scripts this check uses a variable named $entrytype but in the DMS publication script it’s $pub[“entrytype”] and unfortunately I overlooked this.  The result was that the DMS script was assuming (when processing language tags) that every entry wasn’t a ‘main’ entry and therefore the language extraction section of the script didn’t execute and no language tags were extracted.

It turned out that many entries had been edited since I’d added in the language search, meaning all of these had stopped being findable in the language search.  Thankfully I still had the script I’d originally written to extract language tags from all active entry XML files and populate the language search system, so I was able to re-run this and restore the data.

Also for the AND people this week I had a Teams meeting to discuss the new funding application we’re putting together, and also engaged in several email conversations about this.  I can’t say much more about the application at this stage, but it will involve adding lots of nice visualisations to the site (amongst other things).  I had to spend some time this week researching and considering the technical aspects of the new proposal in addition to the time spent in the meeting and writing emails.

I also spent some further time this week working on the new place-names proposal to the BA with Thomas Clancy and gave some advice to Gavin Miller about a new AHRC proposal he’s putting together.  I also made some minor updates to the Iona place-names map and fixed a bug in the interface that was causing the map legend to appear multiple times if a user clicked the ‘reset map’ several times in quick succession.  When this situation arose, the new legend ended up loading in before the old one was fully removed, causing multiple legends to be displayed.  It took a little time to investigate and my solution is something of a hack but it works:  when you press the reset map button any subsequent clicks in the following second are now ignored.  This gives the map time to sort itself out without getting itself in a tangle.

Whilst investigating this issue I also spotted some issues with the ‘browse placenames’ feature.  When resetting the map the contents of the browse pane were not being reset, meaning the list of browse options would not necessarily match the heading shown.  Also after resetting the map the drop-down list to change the visible browse options was no longer triggering.  I managed to fix both these issues in the Iona map and then roll the changes out to the Ayr map too.

I also discovered this week that LiDAR map layers for some areas of Scotland are publicly available for use in map-based resources.  See this page on the NLS site: https://maps.nls.uk/guides/lidar and specifically the links to the available phases listed here: https://maps.nls.uk/guides/lidar/#re-use.

Unfortunately Iona has not yet been covered, but Phase 3 covers much of the Berwickshire area and KCB while Phase 4 covers much of Ayrshire and I contacted the place-names people to see whether we should think about incorporating the LiDAR data into some of the online resources.  This would need to be handled differently to the other map layers and I think would benefit from being an additional layer that users could turn on or off, sitting atop the base map a user has chosen and including an opacity slider.  This would enable the user to easily compare the LiDAR data to features shown on whichever map they’ve selected.  I reckon it has interesting research potential and the place-names people agreed.  I’ll just need to find the time to add this in.

Also this week I was in communication with the Speak For Yersel people as the new survey areas are going to launch in the next week or so.  We agreed on the steps that would need to be taken (from a technical point of view mainly just updating the live Scotland survey to link through to the other areas) and I also added in some social media links and icons for two of the three new surveys.

Finally, I heard back from Deven Parker this week about her Playbills project and the experiments that have been undertaken by someone in Computing Science using ChatGPT to extract data from the images.  This is all looking very promising.  I can’t say too much more about it at this stage, but I spent some time looking through the sample output and giving some feedback and suggestions to Deven.