What's new - Mar 2004

Since I'm going through getting new images of people anyway, I'm replacing many of the Other Species images while I'm about it.

Another 101 entries to the Other Personnel list. That completes TNG - though there are still a handful of folks for both TNG and TOS we missed first time through - and covers the first half of DS9 season 1.

The articles have now been added to the database, which means that thay are now searchable.

Appologies for the site being unavailable earlier today. It was caused by a billing mixup with our webhost. Normal service has been resumed.

Another 121 people have been added, bringing the total in the Other Personnel pages to 707!

A new feature is added to the site today, a search facility. It will allow you to search the database driven parts of the site, this includes the ships (fed, other and shuttles), stations, battles, species, other species, personnel, other personnel, temporal, timeline, epguides, writers, directors, guest cast and all of the lists. That's 32 different places in total, more will be added over time.

To allow for this we've added a new button to the bottom row. We've also taken the opportunity to re-group the items on this strip into a more logical order.

Another fifty or so, finishing off Season 4 of TNG and doing the start of season 5 and also covering The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country.

46 more personnel from TNG - we've almost finished season 4 now...

The other personnel form should now be working on IE under windows. Don't ask why it wasn't working before because the reply may not be repeatable in polite company :-)

Let's just say that it was working on Mac in Netscape, Mozilla, IE and Safari. It was also working on Windows in Netscape and Mozilla but good old IE was performing the submit but refusing to display the output. It wasn't causing any errors, it wasn't crashing, it just wasn't prepared to do anything with the page the server generated. If I redirected the output to another window or frame it worked fine... I guess it would be a dull old world if IE worked the way it's supposed to.

Anyway, rant over, I've completely re-designed the form and made it work. The only remaining issue is that the display button doesn't bounce anymore, but I guess I can't have everything.

Thanks to Guttormur Þorsteinsson for pointing out the problem.

A full review of "Azati Prime" has gone up. One of their better efforts, I think.

We've had a few really big days lately, as far as visits to the site go. Now and again when this happens it's because we were written up in a magazine or something - but we only ever find out about stuff like that when people email me to say they've seen an article (can you believe magazines don't tell you when they write stuff about you? Nor can I.) Anyway, if somebody has seen such a thing could you let me know via the email button at the bottom of the site?

I'm losing track of them! Another 40 or so went up today and yesterday.

Another 66 people from TNG season 3 have been added to the Other People list.

The promised improvement to handling the Other Personnel has arrived...

As of now, clicking on the Other Personnel button in the personnel section takes you to a selection page. It works much like the size comparison section; you get a set of graphical buttons marked 0-9, A, B, C, etc, to pick from, plus a set of ship names with "Crew" and a set of ship names with "Associated with" over them.

The way it works is simple - choose a letter and click display, and you see everybody whose surname begins with that letter. Select a ship or station name from the crew buttons as well, and only those from that ship are displayed. Choose one of the buttons from the Associated with list and it shows people who were on or around or otherwise involved with that ship in some way, but who were not actual crew members.

So if I want to know everybody who appeared on TOS whose surname begins with a P, I click "crew of NCC1701/1701A", and "Associated with NCC1701/1701A", and P, then Display, and you get the eight people who match that.

At the top you also get some shortcuts - a button to select all letters, or 0-F, G-M, etc.

The idea of all this is to give you maximum flexibility - you can refine a search to a very narrow set of parmeters, or you can broaden it as far as you like - click 0-Z and display and you will see everybody we have on the site. Beware of doing something like that though, because we have something like 370 people right now and many, many more to come!

ps. This feature attempts to use a browser cookie to remember your selections. The cookie deleted at the end of the session, ie when you quit your browser. If you disable cookies for our site then the system should still work but each time you click the select button the form will be empty.