The Astrolabe Project

Haven’t posted in a month, but I have been working… If you go have a look at the manual, you will see several new pages. I hope to keep up a good pace the rest of the month.

I added some sections to the astrolabe manual. and was able to make good progress in developing my own art for the various diagrams. I hope to make significant progress this coming week on converting my class handout into a manual

I just posted several changes to SourceForge. I added an option to print a straight alidade as opposed to the default counter-changed one. I also added code to generate bulk sheets with 10 rules and 10 alidades for class handout use. These options are not working well yet, but I hope to have them incorporated into the Astrolabe Generator on the website soon.

I have started adding photos to the astrolabe assembly instructions.

I think that Joomla is going to work out. It is just a bit complicated to set up, but it seems to be working fine now.

I’m not happy with MediaWiki as a back end for the manual. Good software, but a wiki is just not suited to what I want to do. I’m going to try the content management system Joomla. I looked at it to run the whole website, and I might still move away from WordPress if I like it, but for now it seems to do what I want it to do.

I have put up a draft of a set of instructions for building an astrolabe using the output of the Astrolabe generator. It still needs links, polish and pictures. I will link to it when I’m done

Update: It is done except for the photos. I’ll add them when I get a chance. Link is to the right

I added a recommended leading list to the Manual (linked to the right). And started building some manual pages on the parts of the astrolabe. I’m going to have to find some CC or PD art for illustrations, or do some up myself.

I loaded MediaWiki on the site at http://astrolabeproject.com/wiki. I need to play with it to learn the formatting and come up with a plan for organizing the information.

My obsession with the astrolabe has gone on now for over 4 years. The number of projects is proliferating and I think it is time to make a place for them on the web. Over the next few months, as the mood takes me I will be modifying the handout for my astrolabe class into an expanded manual, I am also working on updating and expanding the capabilities of my Astrolabe Generator, and I’m playing with the idea of a Flash-based astrolabe simulator. Keep checking back