Sonya Coleman is Digital Engagement + Social Media Coordinator at the Library of Virginia. First, tell us about your documents. The Library of Virginia houses over 124 million archival items, including state and local records, personal papers, microfilm, maps, photographs, and more. Many of these documents contain structured data, such as the World War I Questionnaires. These … [Read more...] about Interview: Sonya Coleman on Transcribing for the Library of Virginia and Coding New Features for FromThePage
rails
RMagick Lightning Talk at Austin On Rails
This is a transcript of my five-minute lightning talk at the July meeting of Austin On Rails, the local Ruby on Rails user group. It highlights a few things I've learned from my work on MyopicVicar and Autosplit. Hi everyone, I'm Ben Brumfield and I've been a professional Ruby on Rails developer for three whole months, [applause] and I am here to talk about RMagick! … [Read more...] about RMagick Lightning Talk at Austin On Rails
Errata
Two important errata in previous posts are worth highlighting: Wikisource for Manuscript Transcription Commenters on my most recent post, "Wikisource for Manuscript Transcription" have pointed out that the Wikisource rule prohibiting the addition of unpublished works--thereby almost entirely prohibiting manuscript transcription projects--is specific to the language domains. … [Read more...] about Errata
Rails: Logging User Activity for Usability
At the beginning of the month, I started usability testing for FromThePage. Due to my limited resources, I'm not able to perform usability testing in control rooms, or (better yet) hire a disinterested expert with a background in the natural sciences to conduct usability tests for me. I'm pretty much limited to sending people the URL for the app with a pleading e-mail, then … [Read more...] about Rails: Logging User Activity for Usability
Rails 2.0 Gotchas
The deprecation tools for Rails 2.0 are grand, but they really don't tell you everything you need to know. The things that have bitten me so far are: The built-in pagination has been removed from the core framework. Unlike tools like acts_as_list and acts_as_tree, however, there's no obvious plugin that makes the old code work. This is because the old pagination code was … [Read more...] about Rails 2.0 Gotchas