Catching up with the search engine

[Arantor]

Hey all,
Just to let you know, yesterday's and today's strips (from both FF&HH and Sporkman still aren't in the search engine due to the fact that my hard drive died night-before-last. I'm still in the recovery phase so it probably won't be until Monday's strip where I catch up and add both Thursday's and Friday's strips, whilst doing Monday's. (I haven't lost any of the WordOwl files though as far as I can tell, just some other stuff)

I'm really sorry for the inconvenience. And have now bought an external back-up hard drive.

[John T]

It's all good. I'm surprised you actually get them in as fast as you do.

[Arantor]

It's mostly a question of practice and having developed tools to help me transcribe; each strip gets typed into a custom OpenOffice spreadsheet (so I get fancy autocomplete etc. which I couldn't be bothered to write myself back in February when I made the first template), a macro turns that into XML and gets copied into the master file for each webcomic.

That gets mashed through a couple of custom PHP scripts to update the different database structures, then it all goes to a central update script to merge everything online. It sounds massively complex but the tools make the job pretty painless.

Generally the longest part is actually doing the typing, but for most strips, it's limited mostly to the dialogue and a few keypresses for each line (to confirm who said it and whether it's speech or thoughts or whatever)

I might actually make a blog post over on WordOwl in the next couple of days to demonstrate the actual process as it happens. It's really quick though, since most of the work is handled by code rather than me.

The recovery is going well, actually. I haven't lost anything massively significant and what I have lost may become found again yet, it's a question of sitting down with some other tools and gentle prodding, but right now I'm more interested in getting everything re-setup so I can use my PC again.

[Arantor]

I have restored my PC to some semblence of usefulness - insofar as I've been able to restore WordOwl to a usable state for development.

Both Sporkman and Flat Feet & High Heels are back up to date in the search engine now. And with any luck this shouldn't happen again (though it's the first time since I've owned a PC that this has ever happened to me, so I was probably about due.)