'The System' Explained.
If you’ve sent gen to us in the past you may well have received an
e-mail stating that your gen had been added to ‘The System”. This
page is intended to explain “The System”, in brief, the help explain
just what happens to your gen before it reaches the WebPages of ‘The
1980s Timewarp’
Website and, hopefully this will, help explain why it sometimes takes
awhile to appear... and maybe you’ll come close to appreciating just
how much time, work and effort goes into this site – and why there is
nothing else like it on the net.
All gen received is added to a series of databases – one for each year
covered – and a couple more for years we would are yet to add.
Wherever possible your gen is imported into the Database – If you’ve
used our ‘Preferred Format’ this process
takes a matter of a couple of minutes, otherwise a degree of editing is
required, the more editing we need to do, the longer it takes before it
can be added to the Databases – Sometimes gen needs to be completely
typed in afresh, this obviously takes even more time. The gen
that requires the most work, and therefore takes up the most of our
time, is often put to one side (but never ignored), while the easiest
gen to use may go straight onto the site. In that way we can
provide the biggest possible update each week and make the best use of
our available time, which some weeks is severely restricted.
Often missing headcodes and other details have been omitted from gen
received, or are obviously wrong, and so need to be looked up and added
– which all takes up further valuable time. We always come back
to the awkward stuff in the end though! We regularly spend 10 or
more hours during each week just adding new data to the system and it as
often been twice that!
All gen in “The System” is traceable. We can tell which person
or persons told us about any given working, and from that we can tell
if that gen is an “Eyewitness” report, taken from a contributors
Haulage, Photo records or other observations for example, or if gen may
include “Third Party” info such as, reports received via the grapevine,
from friends, gleaned from TOPS lists or recorded on Gen Sheets’.
Once gen has been added to one of our Databases, all new info needs to
be cross checked against all the stuff we already have on file – as the
number of workings in our databases continually grows, the more time
this process takes and there is no fool proof way of automating this
essential activity – again many hours are spend on this each week –
typically it’s a hours work for each Diary page updated, and it can be
much more time spent than that – usually when discrepancies are
found - and they are, quite regularly. Needless to say there have been a number of conflicting
reports received over the years. Some of the most glaring
discrepancies, but by no means all of them, are highlighted on the
‘Conflicting Reports’ page.
All new or amended gen that as been added to the Databases is
flagged, and then it is that new data that is exported for each Diary
Page that is to be updated. Our own Custom written software (more
time spent in writing and updating that) combines this new data with the old version of
the Diary Page. It takes about the same time to add the new data
to a page whether there are 5 new items on a page or 500 – so we try to
update the pages each week for which we believe we have the most new
workings available. Then comes the final check for each Diary
page, to manually delete any duplicate or incorrect entries, add links
to photos, up date the credits for each page – this stage of the
process takes typically takes between 15-30 minutes per diary page but
again can take a lot longer if problems are encountered.
The individual service listings Pages currently have to be manually updated.
This is carried out by checking the Relevant database and editing by hand the HTML
code. Lack of time has restricted this activity of late
unfortunately.
Site © and maintained by UD & Clayhead