#047

I added a “document type” facet to the Transparency and Freedom of Information finder, because people who look at that sort of content need that. On Monday I’ll have to republish all the organisation pages, so the “Corporate reports” and “Transparency data” links go to an appropriately scoped search.

I added a hidden document type facet to the all-content finder, so now you can scope a search to (for example) only teacher misconduct panel outcomes. It’s a hidden facet because there are a lot of document types and we don’t really want to reveal that complexity to users, and different departments tend to use them slightly inconsistently, but occasionally a department does want to be able to link to a very tightly scoped search over its content.

I’ve got a PR to change some confusing wording for the statistics finder. You can sort statistics announcements by “oldest”, which means “soonest” because all their timestamps are in the future (because they’re upcoming statistics). An open problem is what better word to use for sorting in the reverse order, as currently it’s “latest”.

I rewrote the script which puts Google Analytics popularity data into our internal search rankings in Python 3, from Python 2.7. One more script down before the 2020 Python 2 end-of-life deadline, probably many more to go… The 2to3 tool was really good and handled most of the work, but there were a few cases where str and bytes were being confused, which needed manual fixing.

On Thursday I went to a manga exhibition at the British Museum. It was pretty interesting, in addition to all the displays, they had some video interviews with manga editors of what the industry was like from their perspective. There was a lot of focus on the history and influences of manga (as you’d expect), but also some more modern developments. One thing which stood out to me as strange is that there wasn’t any mention of the slice of life genre, which is pretty big. They had every other genre you could think of, but no slice of life. A strange omission.

I bought Downward to the Earth, by Robert Silverberg; Raft, by Stephen Baxter; and The Art of Spirited Away, by Studio Ghibli.