It’s begun. The influx of emails pointing out pages which haven’t been updated yet. I promise you, we’ll get to them. You’d be amazed at how much needs to be edited at this point. Just as an example, I was reading the commentary on the first chapter of Philosopher’s Stone and discovered five or six edits or additions which have to be made just on that page. There are changes like that on almost every page of the entire site, and that’s close to a thousand pages. It’s going to take awhile. All I can do is promise that we’re working on it.
I’m not saying don’t email us. We really do value your input and suggestions, we really do. But if you’re telling us that a page is not longer correct, take a look at the bottom and see when that page was last updated. If the date is before July 21, we haven’t gotten to it yet. Yes, we know that “that awful boy” refers to Snape. Yes, we know that many character descriptions don’t include the details from book seven, like the fact that the person is now dead (which I agree is pretty important!). I think we have most of the new spells added, but there are a few still missing, that’s true. I haven’t even touched the timeline, and obviously there will be a LOT of new information to add there. We do know, and we are working on it, one step at a time.
It’s funny, though, how much “behind the scenes” work needs to be done at the same time as the flashy new stuff. You know what I worked on last night? Figured out where the title page and tailpiece images belong on the first reader’s guide page (since I don’t own a Scholastic edition of the book yet, I had no idea how those fit in), looked for images of the covers in the correct size and resolution, and had a discussion with Bel about how to indicate the epilogue in the Lexicon (is it DHe or DH/e or DHep or what? I decided on DH/e). I’ve also been adding the new interviews to the list of sources. That might not seem particularly important, but since we’re adding all this new material and need to include links to those things, the abbreviations have to be decided upon and the links have to be in place. The Lexicon is a very complex, interrelated website. That’s part of what makes it so cool, but also what makes it take a while to update.
Last night I also modified the main index page with a nice navigation menu along the right side. That should make finding what you want even easier. We’re still working on the overall site navigation, by the way, and some of the links are still going to old pages that will be updated when we get a chance. You should be able to browse more quickly to what you want, though. I don’t think we’ll be working on navigation pages for a while now while we have DH material to occupy our time.
Hang in there. The Lexicon will continue to grow and improve. Thanks for your help and support and input.