With yesterday’s emphasis on Quidditch, I’ve been muddling about with the Portkey, adding information to the Timeline, and testing out how it all fits together. When I add a date to the Timeline, for example, it’s supposed to appear on the Timelines tab of the associated Portkey entries.
I tend to work in outline mode, by which I mean that I go to the “Book Outlines” menu and choose the book I want to work with. When I click on a book (or other canon source), the Portkey shows me the full organized list of events from that source. So while I’m adding things to Quidditch Through the Ages, I keep the outline of that book on my Portkey screen.
As part of that process, I was adding information about Gwenog Jones, the brilliant but dangerous captain of the Harpies. I went through the various places she appears and tagged her on those entries, some of which hadn’t been tagged or iconned yet. Then I did a search of the Portkey for ‘gwenog jones’. I thought the thing had quit on me. It took over sixty seconds to do the search, and there was nothing on the screen to indicate that the search was still going on. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.
Obviously, this needs some tweaking. The search should be faster, although as the amount of information increases, that may be a problem. But some sort of “Search in progress…” notice on the screen would also be very helpful. I don’t currently have a programmer to work on those things, but when I find one, I’ll see what can be done.
In the meantime, if you do a search of the Portkey for a term (as opposed to an advanced search, which goes much faster), please be patient. The Portkey might look like it’s choked, but it’s just busy searching through a LOT of information. And if you know of a good programmer who might want to help with this, let me know.
Steve