This postThis morning after I left the temple, an idea came into my head. It looked roughly like this:
And now, eleven hours later (with an hour taken out for lunch), I’ve got most of it done. This screenshot is real — it’s not a mockup. There are still a few things to add (like the rest of the title details), but you can search for localities and navigate around and such. It’s pretty nice. :) The one caveat is that it takes a while to load the page if there are a lot of microfilms in the list, because it has to ping the UVRFHC’s server for each one. I’m going to talk to the people who coded the Perl file and see if I can send them multiple IDs at once and get a list back. That’d make it faster. As for the rest of it, it’s decently fast, especially considering that it’s screen-scraping everything. Hurray for regular expressions and Ruby! :) (It’s coded in Ruby on Rails, by the way.)
I ordinarily would have posted this only on Outside the Box, or Beyond, but I’m dead tired and so I’m just going to post it here for now as a work-in-progress. Oh, the UVRFHC is the family history center here at BYU. And the whole reason I did this is that ordinarily you can’t tell what films are in the family history center unless you go to the FHC’s site and pull up a little pop-up and type the film number in. This automates it all for you.
