User:RRabbit42/Navigation notes

Workspace for notes on how to automate story arc navigation.

Some of this is dependent upon each book being published, but with three books published and each one covering 18 months of the planned five years, it might not be that hard to do manual updates for the final 18 months until book 4 is published. Bea R. has said there's story notes for beyond five years if they decide to keep going, and as of today, it looks like they might. So, more than 18 months and 5 or more books.

Until a book is published, the only titles available come from Webtoon and Tapas, and those change once the book is being assembled. Changes are either small such as capitalization or major, such as changing from "on thin ice" to "Putting Passion On Ice", or combining two or more arcs into a single arc for a book. (There was also an instance in 2020 where an arc was skipped or missed for the Tapas release. Since Tapas is no longer being updated, this may not be an issue any more. Will have to check to see if it was an issue before.)

Currently, the ArcNav template is manually updated with the previous and next story arc titles. Likewise with the links to the websites for each day's comic of an arc using the ArcLinks template.

Streamlining both can be done in the same manner as on the Simpsons Wiki with Eps-In and Eps-out: template does PAGENAME detection, feeds that into a switch template to get a number, then the prev and next is automatically calculated with a -1 and a +1. All three query a second switch template that changes the numbers back into page names to create links.

It's a duplication of effort with two big switching templates that have to be updated with each new arc, but until I take the time to learn Lua so I can make use of its database-like capabilities, switch functions seems to be the only way to do it.

Other items to be factored into this:
 * accounting for when a comic is used as a repeat
 * the release dates can be different for GoComics vs. Webtoon, and was definitely different due to how Tapas releases were structured and the delays before final discontinuation
 * Webtoon started the same way as Tapas in 2017, but once both caught up to the GoComics releases, Webtoon was switched to an every other day schedule before becoming daily in November.
 * which page number a comic finally ends up on in a book
 * Don't forget that misc drawings are used to pad pages of a book. Those can be smaller drawings or one of the full page "monthly beauties" that are Patreon rewards.
 * special releases like Q&A sessions that don't count as a comic number, so the comic number on Webtoon stopped matching the "episode" number Webtoon uses for each comic after the first special release.
 * The mismatch continues when comics are repeated on Webtoon.
 * Webtoon also sometimes had bonuses on days where GoComics didn't have a regular comic (usually on a Sunday), and as stated, sometimes Tapas was skipped.
 * other switching templates were used to auto-create categories based on seasons, so it should be possible to do the same thing for the "(year) story arcs" and "(book) story arcs" categories, plus inserting manual sorting in order to keep the pages in my preferred chronology listing on category pages instead of the default alphanumeric
 * It would be easier to skip the sorting overrides, given there's over 100 arcs per year (using the Webtoon titles, not what appears in the books). Maybe put in a manual link in the category page description to take people to the first arc for the year (and for the book) instead?
 * The placeholder arc names from Webtoon eventually have to be replaced for template retrieval with the official name assigned to it in a book.
 * Don't forget that sometimes individual comics were given different arcs. Example: the May 6, 2020 comic was originally a separate single-comic arc called "Children of mine" but was merged into "For Your Pies Only" to fill out that page in the book.
 * A more notable example of the opposite direction is how "The Fans Of The Aswang" in book 3 was a combination of "Dearly parted-out and departed", "Raving Reporters", "In the fang of the Aswang", "Evening TV blues" and "home again" (Webtoon)/"Aftermath" (Tapas). (Those last two are another example of how different arc titles were used based on which website it was.)

To start off, tracking of each comic has to be completed for books 1 and 2. That's done for book 3. The automation can be done for those. Comics from Jan 1, 2021 onward will be in book 4 and may have to be done manually and converted after book 4 is published.

Creating the switches that will make the automation work takes time, but using the work I did for Simpsons Wiki that took 105 individual templates and reduced it down to a set of 5 main templates that retrieved data from templates for each season shows it can be done. I just need to figure out exactly what data needs to be tracked for the automation.

Dec 19: Working through mapping the comics in 2017 on the three websites. Found more instances of comics being released in different orders. Will match to book 1 afterwards.

Dec 22: Mapping 2017 online done. Starting mapping to book 1 and converting the 2017 story arcs page to new standard and templates.