Post Archive – Page 2 – Techniques of Digital Heraldry

Google Searches for the CoA Website

For more than a decade, the state of the art for searching the LoARs has been “go to Morsulus.org and run a Google search.”

We can improve on that by using Google’s “Programmable Search Engine” tool, which lets you customize some search engine parameters and then embed a widget on your own page. (This system is already in use for the name-articles search on Morsulus.org, but not the LoAR search.)

This isn’t the final answer to searching the LoARs — in the long run we can improve on this with a custom-coded tool that understands the structure of our letters — but it’s something that can be deployed with little effort, and I think it is an advance over what we have today.

Imagining a New Look for OSCAR

As noted a couple of weeks ago, I recently set up a working mirror of the SCA’s Ordinary & Armorial that incorporates the look and feel of the College’s main website, and tonight I wondered whether the same idea could be extended to the College’s commentary tool, OSCAR.

(I have no mandate to redesign OSCAR, and little sense either of the effort involved or whether such a venture would appeal to the system’s primary developer or the community that uses it, so this should be understood to be purely a matter of idle speculation.)

The resulting mockup includes just six pages: the home page, the list of active letters and that of kingdom letters, the tracking grid, a sample search result, and one sample letter (with commentary expunged).

First Round of Updates to the CoA Website

Over the last few days, two updates have been deployed to the heraldry.sca.org website by Reis ap Tuder, the Codex Herald.

Most noticeably, the larger sans-serif typeface and responsive styling for small screens discussed in last month’s post about Enhanced Readability for the CoA Website are now live.

Secondarily, the first round of updates from the Proposed Navigation Changes for the CoA Website have been applied, creating a new “About Us” page that combines the contents previously found under the “Jobs” and “Links” choices in the main navigation menu.

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.

Historical Timing of East Kingdom Coronation

A recent comment on social media led me to wonder when the East Kingdom’s spring-and-fall calendar for coronations had been established. I knew it had been developed independently of the West, which follows a completely different schedule, and a cursory glance at the list of coronation dates shows that the first few years were much more ad-hoc — when had things stabilized?

I pasted the dates into a spreadsheet and applied a few minor transformations to produce this chart, showing the chaos of the kingdom’s first five years followed by a shift in 1973:

Notes from the Heraldic Technology Roundtable

I’m pleased to report that this weekend’s roundtable session on heraldic technology at KWHSS was productive. More than a dozen people gathered for an hour-long conversation, and we talked through most of the items that had been on my draft agenda while sharing a lot of information and turning up a bunch of new ideas that I hadn’t thought of.

I’ve attempted to summarize the conversation below for reference by folks who weren’t able to attend the session in person.

Agenda for the Heraldic Technology Roundtable

[Update July 1:] I’ve written up some fairly-detailed notes from this weekend’s discussion.

A couple of months ago I posted a proposal for a panel discussion of SCA heraldic software development, which will take place this weekend at KWHSS 2024 (June 29 at 3:30 PM).

I’ve put together the below agenda to help focus the discussion, although of course we’ll play it by ear during the session depending on who shows up and what folks think are productive topics for conversation

All of the Field Only Armory

The publication of this year’s updates to the Field Only Armoury Project are as good reason as any to point people towards this fabulous resource.

Vémundr Syvursson of An Tir has illustrated all 270 field-only badges and devices in the SCA’s heraldic database — all of the armory that consists only of a divided or decorated field, often with various complex lines, treatments, and furs, but without any heraldic charges arranged on top.

Enhanced Readability for the CoA Website

As part of an ongoing effort to update the SCA’s heraldry website, I spent some time this afternoon working on a set of proposed changes to improve the site’s readability.

The existing design hasn’t been significantly updated since it was rolled out more than a decade ago, which leaves it out of synch with two significant changes in computing equipment that occurred over the intervening years:

On the desktop, pixel resolutions increased faster than screen sizes, with the result that many displays moved from 72dpi to 96dpi, and a line of text that is 16 pixels high now appears smaller than it used to.
Mobile devices have moved from the margins to play a key role of the information ecosystem, and it’s entirely commonplace for a website to be viewed on a screen that’s only three inches wide.

As a result, the current CoA website can be difficult to read in both circumstances:

Traceable Art Summer Update

I’ve been remiss in not posting updates about the Traceable Heraldic Art collection lately, with the last announcement having been almost nine months ago, but new material has been quietly added in fits and starts throughout that period, with over 250 new images uploaded since September.

That pace wouldn’t be possible without the kind contributors who agree to share their lovely illustrations with the heraldic community. The biggest single batch arrived from Iago ab Adam, who created vector versions of two dozen images from John Guillim’s original 1610 manuscript for A Display of Heraldry. I am also grateful to Malyss Makneile, who traced images from multiple sources to create a portfolio that I am still working through.