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Sneak Peak
I’ve been holding off on the follow-up to the quotes post because I was planning to soft launch O Pegasus at the same time, but I keep changing how I want to handle things in the site and the soft launch keeps getting pushed back.
So here’s a sneak peak, instead, so you can see what’s keeping me busy.
At the moment, the site is essentially a cross-referenced database of texts and art related to horses in some way. For smaller items (poems, art work, articles), I’m putting in the entire item (assuming copyright or fair use allows). For longer items (novels, journals and magazines), I will generally only have a summary and excerpts. The summary/entry pages are pretty straightforward:
The “Entries” tab gives you a list of all the related entries. For example, if you were looking at the entry for “Bucephalus,” you can find out the authors who mentioned him in their texts, the books the references were in, specific texts (poems/articles/excerpts/quotes), art work that depicts him, and so on:
And all the entries are classified, to a greater or lesser degree of success. The available categories depend on the type of entry it is, and unfortunately due to the general nature of a lot of texts (as I’m already discovering), an awful lot of items get thrown into “Unknown” categories:
Just getting in all the entries and writing summaries and bios has taken a considerably amount of time, but the classifications and relationships have been more complex to set up. I still don’t love the classification system and think my categories are not quite right, but I am going to leave them as they are for at least the soft launch.
Unless I suddenly get a new “bright” idea (this weekend’s was to create a separate list of horse names, so you could easily find everything about Pegasus or Bucephalus or whomever), I really do hope to soft launch by next Monday. We’ll see. It’s a beast. At least it’s keeping me out of trouble, right?
(Why am I doing this, you ask? Because I can. What? I think that’s a perfectly acceptable reason to take on a project like this.)
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Comments
I suspected you’d like it… 
Current stats: 80 authors, 6 books, just shy of 130 texts, just shy of 100 art works and horse’s names (each). The art and name counts will go up, because I’ve been dumping texts in as fast as I can without really pausing to find relevant art/enter in the names. Most of the texts are poems—two of the books were public domain poetry anthologies, so everything in them is going up on the site.
Likelihood of soft launching by Monday? Hard to say. Maybe late, late Monday. I lost about half the day today because I had an extra lesson (on a schoolmaster—awesome ride) and then decided spending time at the barn was way more fun than spending time in front of a computer monitor. And I’ll probably do the same tomorrow after my regular lesson. Can you blame me?
Heck no! Computer monitor…Riding. Computer monitor…Riding. Hmmm.
RIDING.
On Jun 4, 2009, Jane said:
The
Project
Is
HUGE
and WONDERFUL. I’m very happy you can, and you can count on me for instant fandom. I think you can safely say you will never get in trouble again, much to our enlightenment!