I played with programming all day. Created a site to search up to 31 different surnames based on sound matching from a given surname (google limits their searches to 32 words, and one of the words is the site to search): Sound search. Only problem is, it takes a really long time to load (running sound matches through 30,000 names will do that). Thinking of putting a javascript game as a body onload script, but not sure how that will impact the time, or if that will load before the surname list and search does. Also updated my “404 not found” page over on the ‘www’ subdomain.
All-in-all, 11.5 hours. Guess it’s kinda good that winter came back for a weekend, otherwise it wouldn’t have gotten done. Not that it had to be done. But most of these things I create for myself anyway. Eases in searching for surnames with a variety of spellings, like ‘Phettiplace’ or ‘Raner’. Same thing for the Sound-based Database for the Syracuse Baptisms journal. When I originally received the journal issue in late 2006 and offered to do look-ups, I figured it’d be a lot easier to do a thorough job if all the names were in a database and I could search based on sound calculations instead of how I thought they might be alternatively spelled. Hence a multi-year (decade?) project, complete with accusations of copyright violations from I-know-everythingers on the NY Onondaga listserv (not including the transcriber; I have his permission).
As for the character in the ‘missing’ image for the 404 not found page, it is the capital H from the LTOffix character set over at fonts.com.