OutofCharacter / CalendarThoughts

Calendar Thoughts

January 15 2018

This all started with an innocent email....

TMO emailed me this:

Bob, This is just a me thing, and if you decide to do it, would involve a *lot* of pain and work. So I don't expect you to go with it. ;) The dates for the game sessions are MMMDDYY, and when sorted in the Search list (or categories), the game sessions are sorted into an order that is very hard to look through. Whenever I put dates in file names (I do this a lot at work), I use YYYYMMDD (2017-01-11) so that everything always sorts into ascending order. Like I said, changing would be an incredibly massive task. 25 years of files and links .... *shudder* But I thought I'd at least put the idea out there for you to consider (assuming you haven't before now).

SO I wanted to say why I did what I did and what is happening with Calendars.

I sat back and wondered what we really want out of a calendar. What it seems to be to me is that we want to pin an occurrence down in time more precisely than 'way back when' or 'sometime soon'. Then I thought about the idea of how often do those occurrences actually occur? True over time they build up to an immense number of mostly in our every day life (and how I envision the characters of this world living) we need to know about something in the recent past or near future. Three days ago, five day in the future.

To me that means the most important thing is to know what day it is. So when writing down dates the Day should be the most important and come first. If the day is so important then it should have a name.

Which leads me to the idea that you see in the calendar in KloOge. Every Month has 28 days and every day of the year has its own name. Calendars has more links and notes. Including why the seasons are placed where they are along the calendar.

Day 5 Be ___ de, Bel {Mid Fall} is how it shows in the tool bar at the top in KloOge.

Meaning: Bebelde, which is the 5th day of Mid Fall (the 7th month of the year). I have not worked out how to get KloOge to show the middle syllable in the center.

In theory if everyone was extremely in tune with the game world and was totally in character they would say Bebelde 1267 and that would be the only thing you need to know to pinpoint an event along the great flow of history.

I have the notes on the site with Day - Month - Year because all of us are very used to that sort of notation (if not in that order see TMO's original question) rather than a single word for a day of the year.

This does not take into account Dwarves, Elves, etc. with much longer lives and thinking that individual days may or may not matter as much as knowing what season something happened in.

This is where I pause for other people to add thoughts and or ideas.

1-15 TMO

Bob - You have a concept and a vision, which is what is needed. If there's a reason for it, I'm fine with it. However, it looks like you're talking about in-game calendars, whereas I was talking about IRL dates on the roleplay log files (Jan1218 for instance). Doing a search puts all of the January roleplay pages together, and so on. When you're trying to find something recent, you have to look at the end of each one to see what year it happened, and it's confusing.

For instance, here's a portion of a search for 'Ilero':

My suggestion was for me or someone (but probably me ;) ) go through and change the files and all the links to:

1/15 John

I am right with TMO as I deal with similar issue regularly, not just dates. For example I would take the list to excel, use text to column, and resort to paste some where else. If we can change the page names, this might be my kind of project, if considered necessary.

1-15 BOB

AHHH well then yes that can be changed. It would be a LOT of work but someone can make that happen and I have no problem with it at all.

I will start saving the files with that format next week.

Also yes to John, I created all the chat log pages in Excel then copied and pasted into the wiki with the formatting. Exporting and re-importing should not be too hard to do. Only 15 years/pages for that section. 700+ pages of chat logs overall though to change the date format on. Perhaps pick 2010 Jan 08 as the start date for this project?

So John or TMO whoever wants to try to redo all those chat pages, adding the categories would be nice also.

Things to add to the top of each page as you re-save them with a new name:

1-15 TMO

It makes sense to do categories at the same time. So let me sit down and design and set up the categories first before we do the changes. It will take me a bit, and I'll run them past the group first to get your input and changes.

1-15 BOB

One more thing when making the chat log updates/changes.

Remember all the summaries and lots of other places link to the chat log pages with the Jan 12 18 format. When you switch that to 2018 Jan 12 you will need to keep the old page with a link on that to the new page with the new name.

1-16 TMO

My plan had been to fix all those links as well to fit the new naming pattern.

1-16 BOB

That would be a great thing TMO. It will be a lot of work on some of them. I think it will involve doing a search on the page in edit mode to find all the links.... hmmmmm there should be a wiki search for finding what pages link to a page. Will look for that when I am at a computer and not the phone.

And later on....

Yes there is a ?action=refcount that "bring up the reference count form, which allows the user to generate a list of links (all, missing, existing or orphaned) in or from specified groups. See Ref Count Link references counts on pages . Part of the core distribution but must be enabled by the administrator." No clue if that is done or not but have to check that from home.

1/18/18 John

I am working on the in game calendar for now. I am unclear about the first day of the months. If Trall is the first day of the month, would't there have to be a dash for each month to separate them? Just confirming.

1/19 BOB

Yes to John that the middle syllable is still there for the Holiday at the beginning of each month. So Trallze is the first day of the middle of summer and Trallzede is the second day of the middle of summer.