I had another work session with my website designers this weekend and we're one more session away from the Go Live of the new site. This will not yet be the Go Live of the new LHMP interface, since that involves a few complicated technical problems (as well as a lot of clean-up of the existing data), so one of the interim tasks is making sure that nothing gets too broken during the two-part move. (I imagine I'll spend quite some time finding and correcting internal links in the archives so they point to the new LHMP home and not to LJ.)
Part of the new design has involved standardizing the format and content of the entries. Back when I started the Project, of course, I didn't give much thought to standardization. Now that I'm migrating things, I've had to identify the most preferable version of the internal structure that emerged. During this transition period, I've been trying to get in practice by formatting entries according to the new fixed plan.
In designing the structure, I had to consider four types of publications: individual articles, collections of articles where I was covering most or all of the entire collection, books covered in a single entry, and books covered in multiple entries (generally by chapter). The goal was to be able to present the reader with archived material where a whole book or a whole article collection could be read as a single text, or where any article could be listed and read separately. Furthermore, I wanted a way to clearly distinguish between the summary/analysis of the publication itself, my general discussions and personal interaction with the material, and things unrelated to the publication that happened to be discussed in the same blog entry. The bibliography needed to be able to list articles separately as well as listing them as subunits of a collection, but to only list book chapters as subunits of the book and not as separate entries. You can see how this might drive a web designer to drink!
But we seen to have developed a workable plan. So to use today's blog as an example, all the text up to and including this bit would be a separate "blog text" unit that appears only when the publication is initially presented in the blog, but not in the archive of publication-related entries. This is followed by the standard "about the LHMP" link. Then, for a collection of articles or a multi-part book (like the current publication), you get the top-level bibliographic citation, followed by a general introduction to the larger unit. Then you get either the specific article citation or, as in this case, the chapter heading, followed by a brief introduction specific to that item. Finally you get the actual summary/analysis/discussion of the content itself. If you're looking at the archives for a multi-part publication, you get the overall citation/intro at the top, followed by the specific citation, intro, and main-text for each article/chapter in turn. This will all make more sense once it's there to play with.
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