Update to member pages

Forums Website News and Help Update to member pages

Viewing 20 posts - 1 through 20 (of 45 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #574818
    Dominic Ford
    Keymaster

    On Wed 9 December, we will roll out a major upgrade to BAA member pages.

    The new-look member pages, which will be renamed “member albums”, will have greatly improved search facilities, better handling of large high-resolution images, and will also plate-solve images where possible.

    To enable the upgrade to take place, we will start disabling some functions from 9am on Wednesday. You temporarily won’t be able to upload new images, or leave comments.

    We will hope to have the new system live by around 1pm, and from that time you’ll be able to start uploading images again.

    I will post further updates here once the upgrade is completed.

    #583496
    Robin Leadbeater
    Participant

    The ability to upload multiple images against an observing report rather than having to construct a composite image would be useful eg

    https://britastro.org/node/23284

    Robin

    #583497
    Robin Leadbeater
    Participant

    Will already published links to specific observations  still work?

    Robin

    #583499
    Dominic Ford
    Keymaster

    The new member albums are now live. We had a few minor teething issues earlier today, but you should now be able to upload images using the new interface.

    #583500
    Dominic Ford
    Keymaster

    Existing links should continue to work. They will point to an archived version of your old member page content, with some features disabled – e.g. the ability to leave comments.

    #583501
    Dominic Ford
    Keymaster

    The new image gallery software is able to do this, but currently it is only permitted for gallery administrators (e.g. archivists uploading images on behalf of BAA sections) to associate multiple files with a single observation.

    We can certainly consider rolling this out to all BAA members in due course, once we emerge from the immediate post-launch testing phase.

    #583503
    Martin Mobberley
    Participant

    One oddity that has emerged since the upgrade….If I try to log in using Microsoft Edge I just get Dominic’s profile filling the page as if I am Dominic!!!! I can go no further….. HOWEVER, using Google Chrome I can log in as normal with no problem, as I have done to type this query………..

    Martin

    #583504
    Dominic Ford
    Keymaster

    Martin,

    I inadvertently set the log-in page to redirect to my profile at around 2pm, and it was like that until around 2.45pm. Which was a bit of a screw-up…

    To make this more awkward, most web browsers cache web page redirections for around 24 hours. So, if you tried to log in with a particular browser while it was broken, you may continue to have trouble logging in for a little while.

    In Firefox, you can fix this by going to History -> Clear recemt history…. If you delete your browser history from the past couple of hours, it’ll forget about the erroneous redirect. Or, if you do nothing, it should fix itself by tomorrow.

    Sorry about that,

    Dominic

    #583505
    Martin Mobberley
    Participant

    OK Dominic, many thanks for confirming it wasn’t me accidentally trying to hack your profile!

    I will simply keep using Chrome for the BAA pages today and check with Edge again tomorrow.

    I just succeeded in uploading an image so that all appears to work fine.

    Martin

    #583506
    Alan Thomas
    Participant

    Congratulations, Dominic, on your improvements – a nerve-wracking process I expect.

    One question. I notice that some of my images have been ‘plate solved’. I don’t speak that language, so what does it mean and why has it been done? (Sorry – that was two questions!)

    Thanks

    Alan

    #583507
    David Swan
    Spectator

    Superb – thanks Dominic for all your hard work.

    #583508
    Graham Winstanley
    Participant

    Now that the archives of the Deep Sky and Comet sections can be viewed from the same place, do we still need to send images to the sections as well as the member album?

    Graham

    #583510
    Nick James
    Participant

    Hi Graham, I can’t speak for other sections but as far as the Comet Section is concerned you should continue to submit images directly (info on how to do that is here). Once they’ve been checked the images will then appear in the Comet Section archive here, and through Dominic’s coding magic, they will also appear in the new gallery. 

    #583511
    Dominic Ford
    Keymaster

    Hi Alan,

    Thanks for your kind words! Plate-solving refers to the process of looking at the pattern of stars in an image, and attempting to match it against a star catalogue in order to work out the celestial coordinates of the image. We use a piece of software called astrometry.net to do this. However, the software takes a few minutes to run, and newly uploaded observations join a queue to be processed, which means there is a delay between you uploading an image and the celestial coordinates appearing in the associated metadata.

    When the plate-solver finds a match, you should see a panel to the right-hand side of your image with a tick-box “Enable overlay”. This will overlay a star chart over the top of your image.

    Best wishes,

    Dominic

    #583512
    Mike Harlow
    Participant

    Hi Dominic, Nice upgrade to the members pages, I’ve just uploaded an image to test out the new plate solving capability!

    Is it still possible to add hyperlinks in the “About this image” text for each observation?  Also, changing my profile image has been a bit hit-and-miss but haven’t tried again today yet so maybe that was just an issue yesterday.

    Thanks, Mike

    #583513
    Alan Thomas
    Participant

    Ah thanks, Dominic. That’s brilliant. Well done!

    Alan

    #583517
    Richard Miles
    Participant

    Wow Dominic – What a transformation! Well done!

    I couldn’t believe it when I started playing with what is now searchable. Several tens of thousands of comet images for instance. I had been planning on researching Comet 29P coma morphologies over the years’ of observations but have kept putting it off because of the laborious prospect. Now, in principle, anyone can trawl the Comet Section archive and get involved in that type of study. People may be willing to volunteer to measure images as part of a team effort since these image data are now available and downloadable to all members.

    #583520
    Dr Paul Leyland
    Participant

    Thanks, Dominic, for this magnificent work.  It is a vast improvement!

    #583521
    Dr Paul Leyland
    Participant

    A few glitches. In another tab right now I have https://britastro.org/observations/user.php open. It shows me “Showing images 1 to 40 of 8972” rather than just my own uploaded images. Curiously enough, when I first went there after logging on it did as I expected.Although it is clear how to filter by object name, it is not at all apparent to me on how to search by username.

    Next was an attempt to find my Barnard’s star upload to see whether animated GIFs work. Setting the search to “Stars” and Library to “Member Images” resulted in a different set being displayed, some of which were tagged as stars. The majority (an image of the “Copernicus area” for instance) did not.  Adding “Barnard’s Star” into the object box did not change the results found.

    Logging out and logging in again fixed the first problem. I then went to the Barnard’s Star image and found that the animated GIF now works perfectly.  Brilliant! However, the comment is now incorrect but if I try to remove it an error response is given

    #583524
    Dr Paul Leyland
    Participant

    I seem to remember commenting on

    https://britastro.org/observations/observation.php?id=20201122_230000_68e4171212c0b467

    and Martina responding to my comment.  Neither comments appear to have survived the transition to the new regime.

    No big deal but perhaps it is indicative of something that might be?

    OTOH, perhaps advancing senility has damaged my memory.

Viewing 20 posts - 1 through 20 (of 45 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.