Ok, this week, my brain is feeling much better and my morale has been boosted by tinkering with code. First bit of good news – we all successfully installed Wax onto our computers and were able to run the sample site! It took much thread following and bargaining, but we each finally got it to work. Of course, each of our systems were different and took some trial, error, and patience to cajole into accepting all of the dependencies that we just threw at them. I commend my team for not ousting me as their leader when they learned that Wax, the framework I championed, required installing several bits of software over the command line. To anyone who doesn’t know what the command line is, think of that window that hackers use on TV to write their magic commands. Nothing is more frustrating (and then exhilirating!) to see something fail for seemingly no reason. . . and then figure out the problem (or sometimes stuff in a solution from Stack Overflow) and have it WORK.
I then rinse repeated this feeling of frustration and euphoria as I then had to stuff both of our project CSV’s into the repository and keep entering the commands to generate pages from them and run the site locally until it worked. Let me back up. Last week, I mentioned that I would need to prepare the CSV’s (comma separated values – like a low resolution excel file) that would power the song and program pages of the site. We had been preparing the song CSV file for pretty much the whole semester with our research, but the program CSV would need to be made from scratch. I thought the program CSV would be easy to make since I didn’t have to look for any information – I would just have to fill in what was on the program PDF. Boy was I wrong.
Here’s the issue: most of the information per program – i.e. date of concert, city of concert, performers, etc. have multiple values. The Ensemble performs multiple nights in multiple cities with (obviously) multiple performers. And they don’t always have the same number of performances, cities, performers, songs, etc. And sometimes the data with multiple values was associated with data with even MORE values – i.e. each performer was associated with their home city in the program. So, how was I going to reconcile all of these columns?
The answer was fairly simple – keep one column per data type and separate out the values with semicolons (;). We’ll have to loop through this data on the front end in order to separate the values, but it is the simplest way to prepare the data. I thought that switching to a JSON format for the programs may be easier since the structure could be a bit more freeform, but Nicole helpfully pointed out that 1. We’d still need to loop over the data and 2. While *I* as a programmer think that a JSON would look more readable, anyone not familiar with JSON’s / object oriented programming would probably have a harder time with it. Considering that we’re handing this project off to the Ensemble, who may or may not be familiar with JSON’s, it would be simpler to stick with CSV’s (after all, more people have definitely used Excel at some point in their life). Lesson of the Week: Changing data file types does not automatically solve the problem.
So, I set up the headers and Lini and I got to work transcribing the programs. I was careful to include as many details as I could for accessibility’s sake – while we would have the PDF of the programs available, it’s also good to provide the information in a way that users can parse and that provides users who can’t see the PDF for whatever reason with a way to still receive the data.
After that (and some more trial and error), I was able to generate pages for the current programs / list of songs. Mercifully, there were no curveballs in pulling the Cyrillic names or lyrics. So, we’re in business (locally!). I did push the changes up to our GitHub repository, which Alex will use tomorrow in a lesson in pull requests and general GitHub introduction. Exciting times!
Also, we’re going to be interviewing Nadia Tarnawsky (bandurist and singer featured in Dr. Ostashewski’s article on Women in Bandura) next Monday – it’s all coming together!
