More than a decade ago, Tanczos Istvan put together “HeraldStick,” a software package for heralds running consultation tables at events with poor connectivity. The package let a herald with a Windows laptop run a pocket web server with a copy of the O&A web application and a bunch of sites full of names and armory articles and resources, so they could do the same kinds of documentation lookups and conflict checks that they would normally do online even though they were sitting in a tent beyond reach of wireless links.
Continue reading “Running the O&A via Docker”Category: O&A Database
Prototyping a New Look for the O&A
As part of my ongoing efforts to prototype possible changes to the College of Arms website, I’ve applied a related set of stylistic changes to my local mirror of the SCA’s armorial database.
Under the hood, this site is running a fork of the main O&A codebase (along with a custom local configuration file), so the core functionality is the same, but a number of changes have been made to the user interface throughout.
Site-Wide Visual StylE
The most obvious changes are to the overall appearance of the site.
Continue reading “Prototyping a New Look for the O&A”O&A Search for Unregistered OSCAR Submissions
Here’s a nifty trick for the folks who might be running their own O&A server — which is admittedly a very, very small audience.
The OSCAR software can generate a supplementary data file in the same format as oanda.db which contains the names and armory currently in-process on LoIs which have not yet made it to an LoAR.
Continue reading “O&A Search for Unregistered OSCAR Submissions”A Techie’s Guide to the Ordinary & Armorial
I ran a session about the SCA’s O&A database at the Virtual Known World Heraldic and Scribal Symposium this January, and am now belatedly getting a copy of my presentation posted here.
Continue reading “A Techie’s Guide to the Ordinary & Armorial”Descriptions for Field Division Directions
Following the 2021 rules change, SENA A5F1b now says that that changing the direction of partition lines is considered a Substantial Change, as is the difference between divided and undivided fields.
As a result, when using the Complex Search form to do conflict checking for fielded armory, we can add a second line for the field that matches anything with a similar direction. Continue reading “Descriptions for Field Division Directions”
A Roadmap to Morsulus’s Monthly Updates
Last year I wrote up a summary of Morsulus’s process for applying updates from the monthly LoARs to the Society’s O&A database, and then more recently I put together a high-level visual overview of the context in which the Morsulus herald does his work.
More recently, I thought it might be useful to use a similar visual style to summarize the monthly update process, as a way of giving people a graphical roadmap to the data flow before they dive into the step-by-step technical nitty-gritty. Continue reading “A Roadmap to Morsulus’s Monthly Updates”
A Roadmap to the World of Morsulus
Because the tasks performed by the Morsulus Herald mostly take place behind the scenes, even experienced members of the College can be a little vague about what’s involved, so I put together a high-level conceptual diagram that outlines how some of the main elements are related. Continue reading “A Roadmap to the World of Morsulus”
Updating the O-and-A Category Files
On December 14, 2020, Master Herveus d’Ormonde led a few interested heralds through an online session in which we were able to observe a portion of his workflow as Morsulus Herald, watching as he added several new cross-references to the armorial category files and published the changes to the public O&A web site.
I am attaching my notes from this session below in hopes that they might be of interest to other members of the community, although this is admittedly a fairly-obscure topic with a limited audience. Continue reading “Updating the O-and-A Category Files”
Building the O-and-A Search from Source
In a recent post, I described how to install the software that drives the College of Arms’ Ordinary and Armorial on your own web site, but if you’re interested in modifying that software, you’ll need to be able to build it from source.
The O&A web search software is bundled into an open-source package named Morsulus-tools, along with the utilities that are used to manage and update the database. Continue reading “Building the O-and-A Search from Source”
Unusual Weights for the O&A Complex Search
When using the complex search form in the SCA’s online ordinary & armorial, each line of the search is typically coded with a weight of 1, and most people never change this value, but setting these weights to other values do allow for some interesting search techniques.
A while ago, I asked on SCA Heraldry Unofficial Chat about how how different folks used these weight fields, and have summarized that discussion below.
Weight values are limited to non-negative integers, and may optionally be prefixed with a “+” or “&” character. Continue reading “Unusual Weights for the O&A Complex Search”