I continued to work on the Burns Supper Map this week, implementing the ‘click through’ options in the record pop-up.  The record pop-ups now feature a dotted line underneath certain information, and if you press on this the relevant filter for the selected item will display, as the following screenshot demonstrates:

Other than importing more data, integrating the videos and things like the ‘more info’ pop-up and some ‘fact and figures’ that’s pretty much all of the functionality in place now, and I therefore moved on to the user interface, a task that took a fair amount of time, but has been useful.  I developed three alternative interfaces using different colour schemes and fonts, and in some cases different layouts.  For the first version I took the head of Burns from the stained glass image and used this in the ‘Home’ tab and also as the supper icon and the browser tab icon.  The menu sections have a black background and white text and I’ve used the font ‘Quintessential’ for the site heading and also the popup headings.  You can see this in the following screenshot:

For the second version I used a traditional Scottish Blue and White colour scheme.  This version doesn’t feature the disembodied Burns head and it uses the ‘whisky glass’ icon on the map and in the browser tab.  The whole site uses the ‘Baskervville’ serif font throughout (the other versions use the sans-serif ‘Montserrat’ font for most text) with the ‘Baskervville SC’ small-caps variant used for headings:

The third version uses a sort of teal-ish colour scheme with a sort of whisky-orange colour for highlights.  For this one I incorporated the Nasmyth painting of Burns in the ‘Home’ tab and I used the cursive font ‘Tangerine’ for the ‘Burns Suppers’ text in the site heading and in the record pop-up.  Map icons use the cutlery icon with the whisky-orange background.  This is also used in the browser tab, although the icon and colour scheme are rather similar to the ‘Just Eat’ logo and this might be an issue.  Here’s a screenshot:

For this version I also redesigned the record pop-up to make it look sort of like a fancy menu.  This does take up more vertical space and the cursive font used in the headings might be difficult for some people to read, but I quite like the way it looks:

These are just work-in-progress versions and I’ll hopefully meet with the other team members next week to discuss how we should take this forward.  Also this week the project RA Cleo went through the images and reduced the number of images for each supper to a maximum of ten (some had hundreds before).  I then ran a script to resize these images to a maximum of 1600px, which has greatly reduced the file size of the images – there were some previously that were 16MB each.  I then replaced the images on the server with this smaller set, reducing the number of images from 1696 to 893 and reducing the total size of the images from more than 4GB to about 350MB.

I also continued with the Playbills project this week, giving advice to project PI Deven as she edited the data and processing updates to the data.  This included merging and deleting venue and printer records to remove duplicates and reassign playbills to the merged records.  I also began to investigate assigning location data (latitude and longitude) to venues, which is something we’re going to need of we want to create a map-based interface for the data.  We have around 100 venues after merging and deleting, and it’s possible that some others will also be deleted, so it’s not a huge number of records.  However, it’s likely that the location data will need to be manually researched as many of the theatres no longer exist, or at least the buildings  no longe exists as theatres.  For example, our first listed venue is ‘Royal Theatre Aberdeen’, which doesn’t exist anymore, but I found an address for it on this page, meaning I could find the building (now Aberdeen Elm Church) on Google Maps and get the latitude and longitude (57.146607938894356, -2.0920931547723085).  I’ve created a spreadsheet on the project’s Team that we can use to add this data in, and I’ll probably research a few records myself, if I have the time.

I also spent about a day this week writing an initial version of a specification for Joanna’s DOST Auld Laws front-end.  It’s a non-technical overview of what will be developed and how things will work and I created it mainly so we all know what the plan is.  The document I wrote is just a first draft and I sent it on to the team for feedback.  It’s likely that aspects of it will need to be changed and in fact there is a list of questions at the end that will need consideration.  I’ll hopefully get some feedback from the team next week and I’m hoping that we’ll have a final version of the document decided upon before Easter, so I can start development after I get back from my Easter holidays.

I also spent some time investigating a data issue on the Books and Borrowing website.  Certain records for Innerpeffray library didn’t have associated borrowers so Katie and Kit added these in, including creating new borrowers where necessary.  However, the data in the front-end wasn’t updating to show the borrowers when viewing register pages and I needed to figure out why.  It turns out that this is a consequence of the versioning system I implemented last year.  The CMS is now set to data version 2, meaning anything newly added has this version number applied to it.  The front-end is set to only display data version 1, so any new borrowers created will not get displayed as they are version 2 records.  I manually updated the new borrower records to assign them to version 1 and after that they appeared in the front-end.  We still need to fully update the data caches and Solr indexes before the new borrowers are fully integrated with the front-end (e.g. appearing in search results), and this is a task I’ll have to tackle in the next few months.