My time this week was mostly divided between two projects: The Place-names of the Coalfield Communities (Ayrshire) and the Eighteenth Century Playbills project.  We launched the interactive map of Ayrshire place-names during an online event on Wednesday this week and there were a lot of last-minute updates that I needed to implement leading up to this.  This included replacing a lot of placeholder text with actual text, both on the map and the project website more generally and fixing a number of issues with the data.  It turned out that there were almost 250 place-names in the system that had a grid reference that was used by another place-name.  This meant that the map markers were sitting on top of each other and unless the data was filtered it was impossible to tell that multiple markers existed at the point.  To rectify this I wrote a little script that identified the places that shared a grid reference and all places after the first had their longitude updated to move them slightly east of the original location, ensuring the markers did not overlap.  This approach has worked pretty well, although the researchers do still need to properly investigate the duplicates as there are some that are genuine duplicates and should probably be removed.

There was also a slightly strange issue with the CMS, whereby making updates to a specific place-name element was getting blocked by the WordPress plugin Wordfence that runs on the domain.  What was especially strange was that the update was getting blocked in Chrome-based browsers but was completing successfully in Firefox, even though the issue was server-side and the posted data should have been identical in both browsers.  It was the description field that was getting blocked, and it looked like this was due to the element having a fairly long description, as when I replaced it with a shorter text the update was fine.  There was nothing in the contents of the original description that would have caused issues – just a few simple HTML tags.  In the end I just had to add an exception to Wordfence to stop it blocking the upload page, and this worked.  It’s not like Wordfence should really be processing data added via the non-Wordpress, password protected CMS anyway.

I also needed to fix element languages in the elements glossary, as several of these were appearing as beginning with ‘other’ in the alphabetical list, even though they clearly shouldn’t have been.  This was because I created a new ‘element sort order’ field in the database to be used for the alphabetical list and generated the data for it using a script.  But what I forgot to do was update the CMS pages where elements are added or edited to ensure this field subsequently gets populated.  This meant any elements added after I ran the script to generate the field didn’t have data in the field and so the elements were appearing as ‘other’.  I fixed this for the Ayrshire site and also ensured the fix was in place for the other place-names resources too.

Some further tweaks to the elements were required as there were seven different ‘?’ elements (used where an element is unknown) and I merged these into one record.  I also ensured that element certainty in the ‘more information’ view of place-name elements was appearing.  This should have been visible but wasn’t showing up in any of the place-names resources.  A quick tweak of the various APIs got this working across all of the place-names resources.

With all of these updates in place I went live with the map on Wednesday morning, creating a cached version of the full map view data to ensure that the initial map loads speedily.  I also spotted some issues where place-names hadn’t been assigned a classification code, resulting in a blank item getting added to the map legend, and I fixed these.

The online launch of the map (now available at https://ayr-placenames.glasgow.ac.uk/map/) went very well and everyone seemed happy with the map, its data and its potential uses.  I’d say the session was a great success.

I spent most of the remainder of the week writing a requirements document for the front-end for Deven Parker’s Playbills project.  I had hoped to begin work on this earlier in the week, but there was rather more to do before the project launch than I was expecting.  There is a lot to consider for the playbills project in terms of how to process and store the data and present everything online, and by the end of the week I was probably only about half-way through writing the requirements document.  I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to complete it next week, though.

Also this week I updated the facility to save an SVG version of the Historical Thesaurus timeline visualisation to make the process fully JavaScript based.  Previously the SVG was exported for download by posting the XML data to a PHP script, which then triggered the download.  The purely JavaScript way means that no data needs to be posted and echoed out by PHP, which is more secure.  I also had some discussions with the Stirling IT people about bot traffic on the Books and Borrowers site, which is beginning to cause issues.  I talked about our recent experiences with the Emblems site and shared the htaccess script Luca created to sort out that issue.  Hopefully this will help.  I also received a request from Garrick Allen to provide some text for his latest research proposal, and although I began this on Friday afternoon (when the request came in) I didn’t quite manage to finish it.  I’ll get this sorted next week.