What's New from 2006

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What's New - 24 December 2006

Editing was turned on for the general public Friday, starting an official Beta period. The first edit was made by User:Unapersson.
Addressed the following bugs: 10060, 10062, 10066, 20030, 20037, 20038, 20039, 20041, 20042, 20043, 20050, 20053, 20054, 20055, 20056, 20057.
Addressed the following features: 90026, 90029, 90069, 90070, 90071
Added support for title voting.
I'll upload a new version of the tools and the database when the download doesn't take an estimated 12 hours to do.

Reading: John_C._Wright - the Golden Age.

What's New - 17 December 2006

Addressed the following bugs: 10011, 10013, 10016, 10021, 10022, 10023, 10025, 10027, 10028, 10032, 10034, 10035, 10036, 10038, 10055, 10056, 10057, 10058, 30002, 30010, 30011.
Added support for publication and title delete reasons.
Updated the download pages with the latest source and database files.

What's New - 10 December 2006

Addressed the following bugs: 10001, 10002, 10006, 10007, 10008, 10009, 10010, 10012, 10015, 10018, 10019, 10020, 10033, 10041, 10040, 10042, 10044, 10045, 10046, 10048, 10049, 10051, 10052, 10053, 20032, 20045, 30012.
Added support for rejection reasons, and generally fixed up the moderator status across the moderation apps (reviewer, date reviewed, etc...).
Exeeded 180,000 titles.
Updated the download pages with the latest source and database files.

Reading: Charles_Stross - Singularity Sky.

What's New - 19 November 2006

Added support for removing a title from a publication.
Added support to clone publications. This will help in adding reprints of collections and anthologies. Note that there are certain restrictions: you can add titles to a cloned publication (and add unique page numbers), but you cannot edit the individual titles (it is a cloning process after all). There would be no way for the tools to decide whether a modification was supposed to change the parent title or create a variant title, so editing needs to be done either on the original publication or on the clone once it exists.
Added wiki bibliographic URLs to the series lister.
Updated the download pages with the latest source and database files.

Reading: Richard_Morgan - Altered Carbon. Soundtrack: Muse - Black Holes and Revelations.

What's New - 11 November 2006

Added "My Recent Edits", "My Pending Edits", and "My Rejected Edits" support.
Added help URLs to all of the editor pages.
Updated the download pages with the latest source and database files.

Reading: Neal_Asher - Prador Moon.

What's New - 5 November 2006

Added verification support. This includes adding new tables (verification and reference), updating the schema documentation, and adding support to the python applications.
Updated the download pages with the latest source and database files.

Reading: Neal_Asher - Polity Agent.

What's New - 21 October 2006

Updated the download pages with the latest source and database files.

Reading: Neal_Asher - The Voyage of the Sable Keech.

What's New - 29 September 2006

Updated the download pages with the latest source and database files.
Starting to get back into things. Will start attacking the editing bug list so we can get this show on the road.

Reading: Neal_Asher - Brass Man.

What's New - 12 September 2006

Updated the download pages with the latest source and database files. Should be able to devote some time to things after Sept 22.

Reading: Neal_Asher - The Line of Polity.

What's New - 27 August 2006

Updated the download pages with the latest source and database files.

Reading: Neal_Asher - Cowl.

What's New - 6 August 2006

July and August typically require large numbers of work-related hours, and 2006 is no different. I expect involvement with the ISFDB to be fairly light in August; I'll be able to pick up major items like verification support in early September.
Fixed about 7 bugs since content editing was put online.
Updated the download pages with the latest source and database files.

Reading: Neal_Asher - The Skinner.

What's New - 9 July 2006

It always happens like this: you spend a month working on a new feature (say, content editing); you test it for 2 days straight to make sure there are as few bugs as possible; you checkin all the files; and then you wait for a quiet Sunday morning to upload everything - and it doesn't work. You debug the problem and you find that one file - the single most important, central file in the whole feature - has been lost, and your current copy dates from 4 weeks ago. Still don't know why the revert happened, but I did have a backup version from yesterday morning, and I think I've replicated the changes from the last 24 hours.
So content editing is now online. I've tried out a lot of magazines, anthologies, and a few collections and omnibuses, and things seem to working. One known bug: if you editing an existing magazine, and add a set of new book reviews (more than one), then the browser form data is lost. Don't know why yet, and I need to try some other browsers. Workaround: submit the change with a single book review, then after approval add the rest of the titles in a separate session. One known deficiency: there is no way to delete a title from a publication yet.

Reading: Neal_Asher - Gridlinked.

What's New - 1 July 2006

I've got a week off, so I should be able to make significant progress on getting the final editing tools online in the next few days.
Updated the download files.

Reading: Ken_MacLeod - Learning the World, The Cassini Division.

What's New - 11 June 2006

Brought the first round of content editing online - we now have the ability to enter new magazine data again.
Grendelkhan made a proposal on database modifications to support bibliographic verification. There was also some debate on whether bibliographic annotations belong in the wiki or the database proper.
Entered 16 issues of Asimov's Science Fiction and 4 issues of Analog.
A number of templates have been added to the wiki, supporting specific bibliographic references, titles, authors, publications, and online bibliographic resources.
Moved the individual magazine pages in the wiki into their own namespace ("Magazine:").
Fixed two review-related bugs dealing with missing author links.

Reading: Robert_Charles_Wilson - Spin

What's New - 30 May 2006

We brought another editor online last week: Mike Christie.
We started making detailed bibliographic annotations for about 65 authors in the wiki. These are in their own name space (starting with "Author:"), and are accessible from the author's bibliography.
We started writing more detail in the various editing guides.
We've been having lengthly discussions on the best methodology for tracking and verifying bibliographic records. If anyone else has ideas on the topic, feel free to join in (only a few wiki pages are protected now).
Finally finished the form associated with adding/editing content. Should be able to input a new magazine for the first time in the next couple of days.
Once content editing is online, I'll do some serious bug fixing for a few weeks before turning on editing for non moderators.
Fixed problems associated with users having spaces in their names.
Fixed the logout problem.

Reading: John_Scalzi - Old Man's War

What's New - 21 May 2006

The most obvious thing that changed this week was rebuilding the database to use the new variant title and pseudonym support.
We brought another editor on board this week - User:Grendelkhan, who has been hacking away at Heinlein's bibliography. There are now 3 of us kicking the editing tools about and finding bugs.
Fixed a bug in displaying title references in the publication listing.
Fixed a javascript bug which disallowed the addition of new authors and editors to a record.
Added the ability to delete a title (so long as there are no references to it).
Finally updated ISFDB Downloads. Should be able to update these files weekly now.

What's New - 14 May 2006

Most of this week was devoted to tool creation:

Fixed javascript problem in Internet Explorer which prevented the addition of new authors to an existing revord.
Finished the variant title and pseudonym tools (except for relink which isn't critical). In order to run the scripts that modify the current database, I'll need to take the database offline. I may do this early in the morning this week, although I may wait until Saturday morning to do so.
In the meantime, I'll work on the content editors, since those were waiting on the variant title and pseudonym support.
Before editing goes online for the general public, we'll probably want to bring two or three more editors into the fray. If you are interested in moderating the ISFDB, drop a note into the discussion pages for Alvonruff or Ahasuerus.

Reading: Ken MacLeod - The Stone Canal

What's New - 7 May 2006

Short week due to a four-day road trip. Most of the accomplishments for this week were bug fixes:

Fixed errors in title merging, which could leave unreferenced authors in the database.
Fixed a problem in author list editing.
Fixed a matching error that caused errant series data to be printed.
Added a facility to find stray publication records.
Fixed unlinking a title from a series.
Fixed the display of series names.
Fixed the author data editor, which didn't allow for deleting data.
Fixed some Internet Explorer-specific bugs in the user interface.
Added links for bibliographic notes on each author's bibliography which leads to this wiki.

Ahasuerus has also been busy testing the editing facilities, creating definitions and standards, and creating a verification matrix. He also submitted and integrated more changes this week than I did. This coming week will be filled with cleaning up more Ahasuerus-found problems and finishing the editors for variant titles and pseudonyms.

Reading: Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End

What's New - 30 April 2006

Turned on editing for moderators, and for the first time, someone other than myself (Ahasuerus) has integrated a change into the ISFDB. I'll leave the ISFDB in this mode for a few weeks, while we shake out bugs and finish up the remaining editing apps.
Began adding features to support multiple editors and moderators, such as a Recent Changes application.

What's New - 25 April 2006

Updated the online database with the new variant title/pseudonym support - and the system promptly fell to its knees. There's one line of MySQL code that's taking forever to execute on this system. Until it's debugged, the offending line has been commented out. Other than not seeing the new features, the only side effect is that pseudonyms will be a tad more whacky than they already were, but variant titles will remain unchanged.
Minor changes that come along for the ride:
- forthcoming books are now labeled as forthcoming in an author's bibliography.
- series information is now printed in a title's bibliography. Serial information can also be printed there, but as that relies on the variant title support, it's not yet reliable.
- collection and anthology listings are now consistent with each other. This is still preliminary as it will change once page number support is finished.

What's New - 16 April 2006

Moved the What's New data from the blog to the wiki. Since all of the ISFDB's static data will wind up here in the wiki, that needed to be moved as well. Blog navigation through older information was always a bit funky. You can also put this page on your watch list.
I've implemented the login mechanism for data submissions, which uses the same login/passwords as from the Wiki. This is not yet online, as I'm finishing up variant title/pseudonym changes. I expect to finish those items by next weekend.
Reading: Vernor Vinge - A Deepness in the Sky.

What's New - 14 March 2006

Quite a bit has been going on since the beginning of the year:

A ton of error corrections have gone in (about 10,000). This work has found additional errors in the user submission tools, and those have been fixed as well.
The section on the front page that lists forthcoming books has been modified to only display books by marque authors. This should result in a more useful list on the front page.
Work has finally begun on the content editing tools, which are needed to edit magazines, collections, and anthologies. This will let us address short fiction again, an area where we are falling behind.
The ISFDB wiki is filling up several times a day with porn spam. So for the short term I've protected those pages.
I think we're relatively close to turning on user submissions - probably late April or early May.

The ISFDB also celebrated its 10th birthday on February 1st.

Reading: Stephen King - Cell