At the end of the year the Vatican takes two weeks off from digitization, and I use that time to look back at the past year. For this week we'll be looking inwards at changes and improvements to the site and the code, which is freely available on GitHub.

Code Stats

First, a couple of top line numbers from the codebase, 173 commits¹, which caused 4275 lines of code to be added and 627 to be deleted². Unsurprisingly the top two files, contributing 1,500 lines between them, were the addition of 2 Foundation elements, later determined to be extraneous. The biggest changes to internal code were related to the object libraries, the RSS feeds and the fond pages³

Major Code Improvements

• Additional auto-linking sources: CLA (offline as of 12-26-2021) and Pinakes for Reg.gr
• Classes for Manuscript/Manuscripts, Entry/Entries and Fond/Fonds. These don't change anything about the user experience of the site, but make the backend code easier to maintain and augment. As an example, because of the already existing Manuscripts class, it only takes three lines of code to collect the 100 most recent manuscripts, and all of their associated data, for the RSS feed. The Manuscript and Fond objects should be rather obvious, but the Entry may not be. It represents a weekly web entry (basically these blogesque posts). It includes the image links for right side and bottom, links to previous and subsequent posts and the actual post data, raw Markdown and formatted as HTML. When combined with a Manuscripts object built with the week and year, all of the data required for a post is in-hand.

Major Website Improvements

• RSS Feeds - The most obvious major usability improvement during 2021 was the addition of two RSS feeds to the website, and related links to the website footer. A manuscripts feed lists the most recent 100 manuscripts, with any metadata present at the time of generation. The weekly entry feed contains the most recent twenty entries sorted from newest to oldest. This relies on a newly-added field to the entry table in the database published. The feed only picks up "published" entries, allowing me to incrementally edit the entry during the week without overwhelming the feed with extra copies of the same entry.
• Fond pages - The other major addition was a series of pages listing manuscripts by Fond (aka. collection). Although this replicates the organization of the manuscripts on the BAV's own website, I think this implementation adds two useful elements. Firstly, the standard manuscript metadata is presented, which is not available directly on the Vatican's site, even when it is available. Secondly we present a brief history/overview of the Fond in question, giving a background to some of the more obscure collections that is difficult to find elsewhere, apart from a guidebook published by the Vatican. To implement this a fonds table was created with the Fond code (eg. Vat.lat) and the text of the introduction, and a fond_code column was created in the manuscripts table linking to the Fond. As a helpful side-effect, this allows us to do per-Fond statistics very easily, as every manuscript has an indexed code and no string manipulation is needed. The work to provide an introduction to all 88 Fonds is still ongoing

Sources

All of the stats were generated via AskGit, using the following queries

1. SELECT strftime('%Y', commits.author_when) as year_commit, count(*) FROM commits, stats('', commits.hash) WHERE commits.parents < 2
2. SELECT sum(additions), sum(deletions) FROM commits, stats('', commits.hash) WHERE strftime('%Y', commits.author_when) = '2021' AND commits.parents < 2 group by strftime('%Y', commits.author_when)
3. SELECT file_path, sum(additions) as lines_added, sum(deletions) as lines_deleted FROM commits, stats('', commits.hash) WHERE strftime('%Y', commits.author_when) = '2021' AND commits.parents < 2 group by file_path order by lines_added

To the right is f.19r from Vat.lat.5904, a 14th C copy of Boethius' De Institution Musica. It presents a table of harmonies with far more clarity than I've ever been able to wrangle out of an ERD.