isfdb

OK, it's not actually called that - due to potential legal problems - it's titled "Using the ISFDB (Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase)". It is a beginner's guide to allow people to get the most out of the online database without logging in. Now it's out in the wild and you can download version 0.04 from Smashwords - https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/288178 - in various formats. I've only double-checked the online HTML version and the Kindle version and obviously need to do some more work on the screenshots, but would like to know if there are problems with any of the other formats. I'd offer a reward like a Free copy or a percentage of the royalties for your help, but it's priced at £0.00 - you might have to make do with a credit in version 0.04.

P.S. It's not going to be published everywhere just yet, it needs a Cover Image for certain stores. Does anyone want to volunteer to provide one? 1400 pixels wide by about 1.4 to 1.6 times that high, including title and author in big enough letters to show on a thumbnail version. Credit would be given, of course.

After one of the worst Christmas and New Year periods of my life, I'm feeling wonderful. Note - FEELING wonderful: medically I'm still a wreck. Basically I've had almost all my medication changed after my New Year hospital stay and mentally feel a lot better. Even things like arriving home today to find the electricity cut off for want of 9 pence hasn't depressed me. Discovering I can't fit the batteries in my new magnifier without the help of a magnifier hasn't fazed me. Buying a load of charity books that it turns out I already have hasn't upset me. Listening to the radio where a friend reports on the mass eviction of 30+ households hasn't made me feel worse - the more often I hear her repeat her woes the more often I hear people offering sympathy and support. It's a good day, and hopefully one of many to come.

The downside is that in reality my body isn't in a good state. I've got 3 blood tests and an Ultrasound scan to discuss with my GP soon, and I already know there are abnormalities in at least two of those.

But I'm happy, and should stay that way for a while. I'll be hibernating for a while and working on ISFDB again - one more patch and Ahasuerus will have implemented everything I coded last year. Now is a good time to talk to me about what's good or bad about ISFDB. I may even restart the beginners guide to using the ISFDB that I started last year before I discovered that we don't actually accept .DOC or .RTF files! Another user thinks he can fix that, and even if he doesn't I'm feeling enthusiastic enough to print it privately and give it away at a convention. Watch out for a hyperactive unhealthy nerd at Eastercon - I think I can make that at least.

The ISFDB Author directory now doesn't restrict entries to authors whose surname starts with two letters between A and Z - an apostrophe as the second letter is now allowed. I know this still isn't perfect (sorry Peadar!) but it's rescued over 400 authors. Hopefully the software improvements will start flowing a bit more easily now.

I'm driving to Newcastle (English one) on Saturday to let a friend visit her cousin who's in hospital and has just come out of a 5-week coma. As I've never met him before it seems inappropriate for me to visit him as well, so I'm thinking of spending the afternoon indulging in second-hand bookshop visiting. Does anyone have any recommendations? The bigger the SF section, the better.

Also, as it's probably going to be over a four-hour drive each way, I'd rather stay over on Saturday night. Can anyone recommend a good B&B there?

Well, it turned out that I only needed to fill in a few dozen more magazines to bring Urania up to date. (The main series - there are several spin-offs that I could go on to, if I want to continue with Italian.) But some of the more recent titles took me into Italian translations of Chinese and Japanese originals, so I've branched out a little bit. And when I went back to moderating other people's submissions I found a pile of Hungarian translations of Italian titles that nobody else wanted to moderate! I'm not sure they're being entered in the most efficient way, but some people prefer to do things their own way rather than learn the shortest: I got told off for helping enter lots of French J'ai Lu titles without sufficient knowledge of French capitalisation rules.

Any requests for a particular language we're still weak on? Western Alphabet preferred, without too many accents. And if somebody can point me to nicely structured source data, e.g. grids of Title/Author/Date/Publisher/ISBN/Page Count/Price/Artist I can try some mass submissions again.

I haven't updated this in ages, have I? That's mostly because I've been working on Italian magazines - Urania in particular. (Another editor is entering Galassia.) I'm going to take a break after entering the fiction contents for over a thousand issues. I know there's still rework to do - we haven't identified Capitalisation rules for Italian works, so most contents are in what Microsoft determine is "Title Case" - and page counts and numbering are incomplete. And I may have mistyped some stuff. I now know a lot more Italian than before I started (which was next-to-none) but in some ways I think we at ISFDB may have the edge over the original sources now, as they only show Italian and original titles and we may have Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish and Russian too. (Yes, we have editors working in all those languages now.)

If anybody finds this useful, please let me know.

Chris Jensen is hot on my heels in the "Top Contributors" list:
1 Mhhutchins 173357
2 BLongley 124049
3 Chris J 124047
As he's in New Zealand and I'm in England, we seem to leapfrog each other each day. It's a nice incentive to add new stuff rather than wait for it to be submitted.

Next time please remind me that, when I attempt to kick-start a new language on ISFDB, a short series is better than one with several hundred titles. I've learned a lot of Portuguese. And have some ideas on how it could have been a lot easier. Why did I do hundreds of "Add New Novel/Collection/Anthology" followed by hundreds of "Make This Title a Variant Title or Pseudonymous Work" when I have the ability to code a new "Add Translated Publication" option that does both steps in one go?

OK, there's a six-month backlog on code changes so maybe it wouldn't have got the data in any sooner, but I could do it faster in future. I'm going to treat myself to a pint or several and consider my next task. Welsh, maybe?

...or Brazilian, maybe. I've been working on the "Livros do Brasil" "Argonauta" series. It makes a nice change, but apparently I'm annoying fellow moderators that want sources. Or that I should do them in smaller runs - apparently 500 titles at once is a bit much.

Does anyone know a bilingual Portuguese/English Bibliographer that would help us?

I haven't posted a "what happened in 2011" thread as I felt that the second half had very little to show for it, ISFDB-wise. But actually the second half data-improvements built on the software improvements implemented in the first half, and once I get over the "my award improvements have now been waiting six months for implementation" and look at it in a more positive way I think we did quite well.

I think we're now in a position to say that we can cope with French, German, Dutch and a few Finnish titles. The software supports those languages and we have moderators fluent in those languages. Some of our moderators can cope with other languages too, but I wouldn't encourage a deluge of titles in anything else just yet. One of the smallest, simplest changes has turned out to be a big help though - we've expanded "other sites" to cover a load more sources, including the "European library", a gateway to many National libraries. I discovered this when I tried to play a Dutch Editor for a day, and added a lot of Meulenhoff SF titles. Worldcat was quite good for tracking down this series, but was lousy at telling us what the works were translations of. The European Library link will take that ISBN and lead us to "General Catalogue Koninklijke Bibliotheek" where the data we need can be found. I've added over a hundred translations in two days thanks to that, without having any Dutch language skills. (Although of course you do pick up a few words just by trying this sort of thing.)

So I think we've actually done quite well, if mostly only in areas that our original main users (English-speakers) may not appreciate. I've tried out editing from the French, German and Dutch points of view now: I'd be tempted to try Finnish but that gets into more "funny characters" difficulty than I'm happy with. Apparently our bot Fixer has now got all French, German, Italian and Spanish ISBNs from Amazon recovered, if not yet submitted, so it might be a bit redundant to add those manually. And reworking foreign titles we already have is a pain - I have software improvements lined up for that that will reduce a three or four step process to one or two steps, so I can wait for the software to catch up.

So what language do I try next? A Western Alphabet with not too many accents please, with lots of published SF.