Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Patch blog is kaput

Santa Cruz Patch has, without notice, dropped all the blogs, so none of the links from here to there will work. I'm starting to transfer those blog posts from my own files to pages on this blog, beginning with 1 - The Ohlone. The re-postings will be a work in progress for awhile. Rather than list each of the new pages on the list at left, I'll re-purpose the TOC page and update links from there.

Monday, July 14, 2014

Portola again

The plan for Wikipedia editing was to move on from Portola (for a while), but an unexpected development brought me back. As an easy way to connect all of the California places mentioned in the Crespi (and other) diaries of the Portola expedition, I created a new category (category links are found in a bar at the bottom of WP articles) called "Places of the Portola expedition". For reasons never convincingly explained (to my mind) in subsequent discussions, a couple of other editors found that to be an unacceptable use of categories and the cat has now been deleted. It was suggested that a better option would be to create a new article giving a "timeline" of the expedition. Well yes, I agree, but it's a lot of work - which is why I went the "category" route as a short-term solution.

Anyway, I'm now working on that article, to be titled "Timeline of the Portola expedition (1769-70)". Learning some new WP techniques along the way - like how to use the template that creates collapsible sections in an article. It's also a chance to upload a few images from the Bolton book, like the map above.