Blog redesign

Anticipating the launch of Oracc 2, I've redesigned the blog to look more like our new home page. And no, you can't see it yet! But it's coming soon, I promise.

I've also deleted and/or edited some of the old news items that were only of transient use, and started to label the rest. (I'll do the older ones over the next few days.) I hope the labels will help you find what you are looking for, whether you manage, edit or use Oracc projects.

Let me know in the comments or by email what you think of this new look, especially if you're reading on a mobile device. I'd also like to know if there are particular labels you'd find helpful.

Portal pages: preparing for Oracc 2

(For Oracc project managers)

If your Oracc project includes portal web pages that serve as introductory material to your corpus, you will need to ensure that they are valid XHTML 1.0 Strict before they can run on Oracc 2.

That sounds scary but it's not really. It just means that they are encoded so that all browsers can read and represent them correctly—and that Oracc 2's new full-text search can find and use them.

To find out more about how to check and convert your web pages, see the Oracc documentation on validating portal pages as XHTML Strict. If you use ESP to write your portal pages you don't need to do this, as ESP ensures XHTML Strict compliance as a matter of course.

As always, if you have questions or need help with any of this please just email me or a leave a comment here.

All projects are Oracc 2-ready

We have now finished migrating all projects to the new Oracc system (though they are not all visible online yet, and there is still general work to do on the online display and on Piwik).

If you are a project director and your liaison hasn't yet contacted you about what needs to happens next for your project, please feel free to email him or her, or leave me a message here.

New documentation

As the new-look Oracc comes onstream, you will find that it looks a little bit different, and that you can do a lot more with the texts than before. In particular, Steve has dramatically improved the search functionality. People making projects and corpora on Oracc will also, we hope, notice several significant improvements.

I have updated the online help pages for Oracc website users and for project creators. Please take the time to read the pages are most relevant to you, as they will help you get a great deal more out of Oracc. If you have any questions or problems, or can't find what you're looking for, please leave a comment here for me.

Links to help from the Oracc homepage will be reinstated shortly. What you see at the moment is just temporary, while the upgrade is in progress. Meanwhile they are here on the right.

For all Oracc website users

• Using the new-look Oracc 2 online corpora

You can also access this page from the Help button at the top of all Oracc corpus pages.

Note that this is a different URL to the old help pages, which I haven't yet taken down. So if you have bookmarked the old ones, please update your bookmarks. The main user help page has been updated though.

For Oracc project creators

• L2: how to use it

A one-page starting point for all editors and project managers, with links to all the relevant new documentation. You may not need all of this if you don't run a whole project single-handedly; just stop reading when it no longer seems relevant.

Not much has changed in fact, especially for text editing. You will find that lemmatisation is much improved; that you have much more control over individual languages, dialects and glossaries; and that projects rebuild much faster than they did before.

If your project has not yet been migrated it will be soon. We will email you when we are ready for your input. As the new system is much more rigorous than the old one, you will almost certainly have to spend some time error-checking and bug-fixing before you can continue routine work. Be prepared! Remember too that you will need to think of a new password.

Browser support in Oracc 2

Much of the development on Oracc2 over the last day or so has been porting projects to the new infrastructure and fixing some bugs in the lemmatizer. One change visible to web users, though, is that browser support has been improved.

O2 now has support for Safari, Chrome and Opera, in addition to FireFox. This support is not extensively tested, but basic functionality seems good. Of the three, Opera support is initially less robust than the two webkit-based browsers (Safari/Chrome).

It is possible that O2 will not support officially support Internet Explorer, which has a way of always requiring extra work to make basic things function. I hope that between FireFox, Safari and Chrome, with a possible option on Opera, people will have enough choice to be able to enjoy using Oracc.