Views from Medina Road

I updated the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards today, mostly to correct a problem that an alert visitor to the site emailed me about a couple weeks ago. Apparently when I folded in, last month, results of the Locus Online 1999 poll for all-time best novella, novelette, and short story, I'd used a preliminary set of results rather than the final set as posted. Or in importing records from one database to another, they'd gotten scrambled somehow. Or something. Anyway they weren't right, so I wanted to get them fixed. I also added the results for all-time anthology and collection, which I hadn't gotten last month.

While I was at it, I folded in the recent nominations for the Nebulas, the Clarke, the PKD, and the BSFAs, though not 3 or 4 other sets of nominations that have already been announced this year. I'll get to them.

Since the pages of the Awards Index site are so inter-linked, it would be risky to update just a portion. So I always re-generate the entire site, some 2500+ html pages. Takes 1/2 hour to an hour for the database to generate all the pages (depending on which computer I'm on), and a similar amount of time to upload them all to the server (depending on what connection I have.)

I realize that some of the global tallies are now no longer strictly correct; they compile recent nominations for awards whose winners have not yet been announced, while the tally breakdown assumes nominations are either winners or losers. If I continue to do interim updates of the site, I'll have to fix the tallies so they only include awards whose results have been announced.