What's New from 1997

What's New from 1997

What's New - 15 December 1997

• Exceeded 70,000 titles.
• I found out last week that there are some browsers that do not support 8-bit ascii, which means that those particular browsers could not select on authors like Philip José Farmer. So the external representation of such authors has been modified to use the traditional 'percent/2-digit/ascii-hexadecimal' format often used in URLs. Hopefully, everyone can see everything now.
• Added a facility to track translations. This feature is not currently accessible from the user submission pages.
• The content listings of about 50 issues of Weird Tales have been brought online.
• People have started asking me if the End of Science Fiction has finally arrived. They cite the lack of data in the forthcoming books section. Okay, I get it; forthcoming books have been * My problems with my copy of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction have been solved. See my essay: Advanced Book Bindery Through Duct-Tape.

What's New - 24 November 1997

• After more than 2 years of intense daily abuse, my copy of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Clute & Nicholls) has finally taken major damage in the form of a tear down the spine. This is a pretty incredible performance from a 1370 page behemoth that weighs in at nearly five pounds. Moving the volume from my reference shelf has become a part of my daily exercise regimen, and the muscle tone of my biceps has improved considerably. The collectability of my particular copy has long since moved from "very fine" through "fine" through "very good" through "good" to "readable if one scrapes away the peanut butter smudges", so I'm considering having it rebound. I'm thinking along the lines of some sort of MIL-Spec, battle-ready quality of binding, perhaps in shocking orange to enhance its findability.
• An internal construct called "award tags" has been brought online. This doesn't affect the appearance of the ISFDB in any way, but in does change the layout of the database files. As such, the engine is changed to version 1.7.
• Introduced some new code which pulls serialization data next to the title. This is tricky as serials are often published with a different title than when published as a novel. I have a mechanism to deal with this, but I'm not going to go through all 1400 serial entries to check on them - I'll fix them as I run into them. So if you see any orphaned serials in the Serials section on an author's bibiliography, please submit a brief correction that states the serial needs to be moved into the title,
• Introduced a new feature which allows editors (someone like John W. Campbell, Jr.) to be linked to the magazines which they edited. It is now possible to follow an editor to a specific year of a magazine, to a listing of the magazines published in that calender year, to the content listing of a specific issue.
• Added a page for Science Fiction Chronicle.
• User-submitted data is way up (this is a Good Thing). I'll hopefully get caught up over the 4-day weekend next week.

What's New - 27 October 1997

• Added pages for Tales of the Unanticipated, Terminal Flight, and Pulphouse.
• Pulled in a bunch of Planet Stories submissions.

What's New - 20 October 1997

• Pushed all database-derived pages into a new section; added a new section all about author ages.
• Exceeded 65,000 titles.

What's New - 15 October 1997

• Officially moved the site to http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb.
• Added a new page to list some of the more famous print series.

What's New - 06 October 1997

• Added pages for the fractal and The Third Alternative.

What's New - 15 September 1997

• Added pages for Astonishing Stories and Planet Stories.

What's New - 04 September 1997

• Updated the following awards: Hugos, John W. Campbell Award, WFA, IHG, and Sidewise.

What's New - 25 August 1997

• Updated the following awards: Asimov Reader's Poll, John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Mythopoeic, SFBC award, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Short Story Award.

What's New - 20 August 1997

• Most of the early issues (1949-1963) of Fantasy & Science Fiction have now been indexed thanks to David Stovall.

What's New - 12 August 1997

• Added the complete run of Vertex: The Magazine of Science Fiction.
• Exceeded 60,000 titles.
• Infrastructure difficulties should be resolved this week, allowing work on submitted data to resume.

What's New - 7 August 1997

• The latest Locus Poll results are now online.

What's New - 9 July 1997

• In case you haven't noticed - it's summer; the grass needs cutting, the house needs a little paint, that privacy fence needs to go up, and sometimes you just want to sit in the backyard and watch the thunderstorms roll in. So things are slipping here a bit.

What's New - 2 June 1997

• Added the Imaginaire awards.
• A major renovation of the source code is taking place. Hopefully, you won't see any differences in ISFDB appearance; if you do encounter server errors, send email.

What's New - 27 May 1997

• Completely caught up on user-submitted data. If it's not here, please resubmit; if you're making corrections that didn't seem to take, make some comments in the correction as a guide.
• Added Barnes and Noble to the ISBN links.

What's New - 19 May 1997

• Due to the ISFDB being offline, and a home system that needed reinstallation, no submitted data was merged into the ISFDB this weekend.

What's New - 05 May 1997

• Added books.com and bookpages to the ISBN links.
• When the publisher is displayed on the Content Listing, and that publisher has a web link, the publisher will appear as a link to that web page. Publishers supported to date: Tor, NESFA, Bantam, and Baen.

What's New - 14 April 1997

• Added Oldest Living Author/Editor/Artist page.
• Merged in 74 Robert Silverberg anthologies from the NESFA database.

What's New - 07 April 1997

• Exceeded 55,000 titles.

What's New - 31 March 1997

• Added ISBN links to Future Fantasy (see 24 March 97).
• Fixed the problem with author names that contained accented characters. It turns out that the SunOS version of tolower(), which converts strings to lowercase, only works on 7-bit ASCII. Authors like Philip José Farmer and Caitlín R. Kiernan should work now.

What's New - 24 March 1997

• Added the ability to follow an ISBN to Amazon Books. Note that this is meant to be a general purpose feature, and not an endorsement of Amazon Books; if other online bookstores have pages that can be accessed via an ISBN, I'll be more than happy to add support for those stores as well. The new links are displayed on the Content Listing page for a work - if that work has an ISBN.

What's New - 15 March 1997

• Exceeded 50,000 titles.
• Split up the FAQ into multiple files in preparation of vast reworking.
• Replaced the pop-up menu on the awards page with radio buttons. There are now so many awards that the old menu didn't fit on smaller monitors.
• Added the IHG and Deathrealm awards; updated the BSFA and Tiptree awards.
• Added content listings of Aurealis, an Australian semiprozine.

What's New - 10 March 1997

• Due to increased CPU usage, attacked the performance of plist.cgi (This is the binary that extracts and prints content listings). Implemented a new database index called titles.xbt. This allows looking up the complete contents in a single index entry instead of searching the entire database. This sped up the performance of plist.cgi by 270%. On the downside, it greatly increases the compile time of the database (by about 30%), and requires another 600k of diskspace. The runtime performance increase should be quite noticable.
• Implemented a strange sorting algorithm for exact_author.cgi and a_exact_author.cgi which uses a combination of hash tables and linked lists. This sped up the performance of the summary bibliographies by 175%. This should be noticable on longer summary bibliographies.
• Both of the above performance changes are fairly radical, involving much new code. Please report any problems you see.

What's New - 06 March 1997

• Lots of publication data was unviewable due to a bad entry. Not only was the bad entry repaired, but both compile-time and run-time checks have been put in place to make sure that particular problem doesn't happen again.
• A page for Nebula Science Fiction was put online.

What's New - 04 March 1997

• Finally entered all the issues of Unknown. Maybe it only seems like years.

What's New - 03 March 1997

• Merged in the Michael J. Cross anthology database.
• Started a page for Wonder Stories.
• Finally fixed anthology series output so that they can be numbered as part of a super series.

What's New - 26 February 1997

• Updated the Nebula Awards.
• Fixed the award scoring routines to reflect some of the new numbering schemes in the awards area. This resulted is some minor adjustments of the Top 100 lists.

What's New - 20 February 1997

• Recently added the Compton Crook awards.
• Fixed a bug whereby award citations for authors writing under a pseudonym weren't being picked up on the author's summary bibliography.
• I'm way behind on user-submitted data, so don't panic.

What's New - 20 January 1997

• Exceeded 45,000 titles.
• Added the Sidewise awards.
• I'm finally caught up on user-submitted data.

What's New - 06 January 1997

• Added the following awards: Balrog, Aurealis, Gandalf, Asimov's Readers' Poll, and Asimov's Undergraduate Award.
• Changed the Top Novels By Year and Top Short Stories By Year pages. Works are now collated by publication date, not the date of last award.
• Added 3 new Top 100 lists which track the top anthologies, collections, and magazines based on the amount of award-nominated fiction they contain.