Activity report for mid-March—mid-April, 2004

by Ivan Kurmanov

This is about my work during March, 18th - April, 21th period, year 2004.

RePEc Author Service transfer

At the start of this period we transferred HoPEc service from irwell machine in Manchester to ACIS software on the xerces machine.

Soon after the new service became visible to the internet, I started importing HoPEc’s ReDIF templates.  At least one and a half week since the service launch I’ve been doing little development work.  I monitored the importing process.  I monitored the users’ interactions with the service.  I fixed some problems that were appearing and bugs that became visible.

Special treatment of some old HoPEc URLs

HoPEc profile quick-access URLs like http://authors.repec.org/rp/1978-02-17:IVAN_KURMANOV are caught and a special page with explanations is brought up.

Development

Then I returned back to development.  The main areas of my work during that time were:

• research profile: automatic search, presentation
• name variations suggestion and treatment (in searches)
• fixing small bugs and issues in different areas and screens of ACIS
• testing and improving compatibilty of ACIS with different browsers (many issues fixed)
• some internals cleaning
• alternative color theme for presentation

Research profile and automatic search

Christian Zimmermann reported these issues:

• Users didn’t see their name variations on the research profile screen by default.  They had to click to see them.

  Many people’s profiles had been imported with incomplete name variations (which could not have been calculated automatically or where it would be difficult).  When they returned to find their new works in the database, many didn’t realize that their name variations are incomplete, because didn’t bother to check.

  Now the name variations are visible by default and a link to edit them is more accessible.

• Some wording on the research profile page was potentially confusing.  I removed it.

Name variations

Automatic name variations suggestion on the name details screen (JavaScript).  Tested in IE5, IE5.5, IE6 (on Windows), in Opera 7, in Mozilla.  Degrades gracefully in IE4 — no warnings appear.  Made special workarounds for bugs in Opera and IE 5.  Identified a bug in Opera 7 and reported it to the Opera developers.

Have not tested in Netscape 4.xx; still have not installed it, which is not good, I know.

An alternative color theme

I made an alternative, “brownish” CSS stylesheet for ACIS. Its only difference from the main one is the color-set. Exactly 10 lines long, not counting comments and whitespace, it offers a completely different look to the service.

Users can switch the theme by clicking a link at the bottom of each page.  The user’s preference will be stored in a cookie and will be used automatically on the next time a page is loaded.  The switcher is hidden from non-javascript browsers.

Tested in IE 5.0, 5.5, 6.0 on Windows and Opera 7, Mozilla. Degrades well in IE4.  While making this work, I found another Opera 7 bug; have not yet identified and reported it.

Credits: Paul Bowden’s Style Switcher technology (with minor modifications) as published in A List Apart.

Administrative functions

Admin’s search for documents, profiles and users facility, /adm/search screen.  Not finished, but already usable.

TO DO: admin’s facility to edit or remove an account (profile).

Performance

Performance improvement attempt.  Probably insignificant in the general course of events, but looked like a good thing to do—make some specific perl module loading lazy.  Thus avoiding to load some Perl modules, until they are really needed.

Other things done

• a fix to RePEc data processing algorithm—to exclude archive subdirectories, unless they are valid six-letter series dirs. (Also a fix to exclude societies and associations from RePEc:edi.)
• email address obfuscation with JavaScript
• scripts to create and mirror ReDIF:per archive
• a script to create a list of email addresses and respective record identifiers of all the users (for Christian’s monthly mailing)
• name suffix on the initial registration page is now a drop-down list with reasonable values
• improved HTTP support with respect to caches; caching is prohibited for dynamically regenerated pages and allowed for static site’s pages like /about.

  This is not perfect because these pages are not strictly static—they might include session-dependent menus or links in the header.  If such copy of the page is cached by a proxy, this is no good.

• a script for parsing my ACIS CVS' commits log
• many small things, too small to mention

Plan

• update the project website
• AMF support
• automatic research profile maintenance