Category: O&A Database

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.

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”

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”

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”

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”