It's a rare and special treat when I can combine my hobby with my professional skills and experience. Over the past few weeks I've been spending some of my spare time doing exactly that – creating a web site to display slide rule information. The information is a compendium of all the models of slide rules ever made by Hemmi, who was the world's largest slide rule manufacturer. The data on this site was collected by Paul Ross, with help from several other slide rule collectors. It is now the “gold standard” reference for everything Hemmi.
The original web site was created (by Paul Ross) using Microsoft Excel. This was a tool familiar to Paul, and therefore very easy for him to use. But the resulting web site only works well with Internet Exploder (Microsoft pays little attention to compatibility), is very slow to download (because the HTML file is huge), and is a purely static page (you can't interact with the web page in any way). Paul is a slide rule god, not a geek. I'm a geek. I volunteered to help, and Paul eagerly accepted.
Last night I posted the first beta test version of the new site, and sent a message to slide rule collectors to have them start banging on it. I got my first bug report this morning, and I'm sure I'll get more. The new site “understands” the Hemmi slide rule data – you can do things like sort the slide rules in various ways, and limit the slide rules that you're looking at. From a technical perspective, one of the most challenging things was figuring out how to display the large amount of data in a way that was both compact and easy to read. This depends on the way the web browsers lay out tables, which is a very tricky thing. To help with this problem, I made many of the user interface details changeable on the fly – something not often seen on web sites.
Bottom line: it was lots of fun!
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