The Skull Cinema

Took me a while to cotton on to this, but adjusting my posting workflow slightly has made a big difference to the time taken to publish a blog post . Pasting content into Blogger's WYSIWYG interface [ Compose ], which just for the text so far results in this, <br /> <div style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; margin: 0in;"> <br /></div> <br /> <div style="margin: 0in;"> <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">Took me a while to cotton on to this, but adjusting my posting workflow slightly has made a big difference to the time taken to publish a </span><a href="http://blog.skullcinema.com/2018/12/eight-steps-to-blog-posting.html"><span style="font-family: &quot; font-size: 12.0pt;">blog post</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">. </span></div> <br /> <...

Or how the Pangasianodon lost its teeth. So I am making a stir-fry using a recipe from the excellent Chinese cookbook ' Ken Hom's Hot Wok .' It is a great book from which we have not had a bad meal after trying 30 of the recipes, and I now always use his 'one pint of water to 400 g of rice' method for steamed rice . The recipe in question this time was stir-fried fish with black bean sauce , which required procuring some white fish. So off to the supermarket to get some. Cod fillets were available at £14/kg and something called basa at £10.50/kg (or 25% cheaper). As stir-fry flavours are usually robust, cheaper is OK with me. But what sort of fish is a basa? The source of the fish stated that it was Pangasianodon hypophthalmus ; so that is the binomial name for a basa fish, yes? No, in Vietnam P. hypophthalmus is called tra and basa is a different, although closely related, catfish species Pangasius bocourti . P. hypophthalmus is preferred ...

It has been 11 weeks since my last post. I have been bad (otherwise engaged) but promise I will be good (start making headway on this project again). Having a break in posting does allow for a bit of a review of what I have done so far. Basically I have tackled two projects, documenting the Blogger interface and working on Wikipedia. The first is essentially complete at the brief overview level and the second stalled as the learning curve required to progress steepened. Both are worthy/interesting enough to me to continue with them. But I'd still like to broaden this blog to include more, different topics, although precisely what I haven't decided. There, that feels better; I did mention that this would be writing therapy didn't I?

Having constructed a general model citation , I can now turn to creating a specific one for a particular word in the 1933 re-issue of the first edition of the OED . During the process of putting some of the bibliographic research for the re-issue onto the OED Wikipage the presence of existing citation templates was brought to my attention by Martin of Sheffield . The first port of call then, is to review what is currently available. There are four citation templates (see note) related to the OED listed on Category:Dictionary source templates ( Cite OED , Cite OED1 , Cite OED2 , Cite OED 1933 ) and, of these, Cite OED1 and Cite OED 1933 are for references to the first edition of the OED and therefore of interest. The outputs of the Cite OED1 and Cite OED 1933 templates are, "{{{1}}}". Oxford English Dictionary (1st ed.). Oxford University Press . 1933. and, {{{1}}} . Oxford English Dictionary (1st ed.). Oxford University Press. 1933. respectively...

Having worked through the process of creating a Wikipedia citation for the 1933 re-issue of the first edition of the OED using the Cite book template, it is now time to deploy it. The first job is to start my user page and drop the model citation onto it, with a link to the construction notes post , and ask for comments. No-one will see it, so I don't expect any feedback. The next step is to edit the table of Oxford English Dictionary Publications in the OED article to include the 1933 Supplement as an independent publication under the title, ' A New English Dictionary. ' The table isn't actually part of the main content of the OED article. For some reason it exists as an independent template (that is only used on one page), which seems a bit overcomplicated. Anyway, making the change wasn't complicated, though I'd better add the template to my Watchlist to make sure the change sticks. Now I can split the 1933 reference. First I checked all of the re...

Now I am in a position to begin assembling the citation. Finally. So let's get to it, the data used will be from the title pages below. The first terms of the Cite book template are last1 and first1 referring to the first and last names of the first author; and this is where the fun starts. The title page of the 1933 publication lists no authors, only editors (the OED was one of the earliest crowdsourced projects ). Let's make a decision to respect their published titles so these terms can be left blank. The next terms are author-link1 and author-mask1 . Author-link provides a field with which to encode a link to the Wiki page of the author, and author-mask allows an individual author's name to be replaced with em-dashes. More blanks. For books with multiple authors the subsequent last and first names are added as last n, first n , where n is the total number of authors. More blanks. The fields display-authors and last-author-amp control how ma...

Having completed the bibliographic research of the first edition (specifically the 1933 re-issue of the OED ) as part of the process of creating a model citation, I now have all the links to a full copy of the 1933 issue on the Internet Archive . Do I add them to the OED Wikipedia article? I could just go ahead and see if they get deleted or not, or I could be a bit more circumspect and ask on the talk page of the OED Wiki article first. Talk pages are used in Wikipedia to allow discussion of edits made to the accompanying article. There are guidelines for how to use them and a tutorial to get you started. Given that the vast majority (though not the entirety) of the 1933 re-issue's content is already included in the links to the 1888-1928 first edition sources given at the end of the article it is not clear whether the data for the 1933 re-issue is a worthwhile addition. Also the copyright status of the dictionary is a bit murky; at least I couldn't find a...