Again with the optimizing! Oy!

I've been tinkering again.

First, I did some server-side wizarding and sped up the website by a small margin (maybe 25%) and also stopped a nasty bug that was slowing down pages every once in a while.

I fixed some smallish bugs on the search pages. The user interface should be a tad more useful and friendly there.

While designing a new, awesome feature (verb paradigms!) I uncovered some paradigm errors. Those have been neatly squashed.

Soon, you will see a masterpiece in action! Full paradigms for all parts of speech! Right now I've got the verbs mostly working. I'll unveil this feature when I feel it's good enough for prime-time.

That's all for now! Carry on...

Interface Changes, Keyboard Shortcuts and the Ancient Passive Infinitive

I made a couple of small changes to the search interface, mostly by adding keyboard shortcuts:

• When you visit the page, the cursor is automatically placed in the search box. Just start typing because there's no need to click on the search box!
• You can press the up and down arrows to scroll through the list.
• You can press the enter key to view a word.
  

I will also duplicate these changes on the English to Latin search page.

Next I coded an inflectional ending for the "ancient passive infinitive" in -ier. Lucretius is fond of using words like vocārier instead of vocarī (Allen and Greenough, New Latin Grammar, 183.4).

Lucretian Updates

Based on the recent lack of news on this site, you might assume that the Latin Lexicon is dormant or stagnant. Yet nothing could be further from the truth! In fact there's been quite a bit of behind-the-scenes activity!

Let me start out by apologizing for not updating more often. This semester has turned out to be rather more packed with excitement than the last one. Since I've been short on time, I allowed blogging and site documentation slip.

In terms of back end coding, there hasn't been much activity. I've cleaned up a few bugs here and there. For instance, I cleaned up a UTF8 bug on the Word Study Tool.

But in more interesting news, I've been a busy beaver correcting words that appear in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura Book III. For the last 5 semesters our classes have focused on Augustan poets. Since the vocabulary is somewhat stock among those guys, I ended up doing very few corrections to the dictionary entries themselves. But since Lucretius uses a whole new set of vocabulary, the amount of "cleanup" is massive! This is a good thing, since words which contain errors get fixed and the Latin Lexicon slowly improves in quality.

Since the news/blog section of this site gives the first impression to new visitors, it might look bad if the front page isn't regularly updated. Good impressions are the best impressions, so I'll try to update more regularly despite the crazy-busy semester I'm having.

On that note, it's back to the grindstone for me. Valēte!

Update: To the parsing engine I added a couple of pronouns: quisquam and quidam, since Lucretius is so fond of them.