Month: January 2025

Publishing the LoARs to the Web

My thanks to Herveus Gnome for letting me watch over his shoulder as he published the November LoAR so that I could document this process here.

In addition to maintaining the O&A website, the Morsulus office is also responsible for publishing the LoARs to the College’s website.

Production of the LoARs in multiple formats (HTML, PDF, XML) is handled by Silver Staple, the post-meeting clerk. The final LoARs arrive as an email with attached zip files, distributed to the Sovereigns and relevant staff.

After unpacking the final-FORMAT.zip package of HTML and PDF files, the resulting folder is renamed to numeric form of the month — in the case of November that is 11.

Then an index page is created by copying welcome.html from the prior month’s folder, and the month name is updated in both written and numeric form — s/October/November, s/24-10/24-11. The errata link might need to be commented or uncommented, if last month’s letter included one and this one doesn’t, or vice-versa. The copyright date also needs to be updated for the first letter posted each year. Other material in the index file, such as a line of PHP code that was added recently, can mostly be ignored.

Make sure that the files are all set to world-readable, or Unix-style 644 permissions. Then copy the files to the production server with scp -r 11 charlemagne.sca.org:loar/2024. (This pathname works because Herveus has a symlink at ~/loar that points to the web directory that holds the LoAR files.)

Lastly, the loar/welcome.html file is edited to uncomment the link to the current month’s directory. When publishing the January letter each year, a new line of month links has to be made by copying the previous year’s and then commenting out most of them.

At this point, the newly-published LoAR should be available on the http://heraldry.sca.org/loar/ page, and this process is completed for the month.

Historical Trends in Extraordinary Titles

There’s recently been an effort to update the list of Heralds Extraordinary, originally maintained by Modar Neznanich but now posted as an official College reference. Jeanne Marie Lacroix did an amazing job of checking through the entire set of records, filling in gaps and making corrections throughout.

Based on that data, I put together a little chart showing the number of new Heralds Extraordinary created each year since the rank was established.

It’s interesting to see the distribution change from around an average of less than two per year during the first two decades to nearly ten per year starting in the middle of 2002. I’m not sure what triggered the culture change, but it sure is dramatic.

Even with the increased rate in recent decades, this remains a small group, with just over 250 people so recognized in 42 years.

Caveats

This visualization is based on the data available to date, and it’s possible that a few items have been overlooked or that some entries will end up being shifted by a year or two, but this should be reasonably close to the final result.

Note also that record keeping in the early years of the College was somewhat haphazard, and in some cases we only have a date for when a title was registered rather than when the rank was awarded.