New LoAR search tool

[Juliean Galak]

Greetings!

I wanted to announce a sort-of-new resource that's now publicly available to everyone: an improved precedent search. This is an outgrowth of the precedent tagging project, but while that's still in the works, Laurel has decided to make this part of it available to the public now.

If you go to "https://heraldry.sca.org/precdb" you will get a LoAR search tool. This allows you to search the LoARs in this system (currently 01/2017-11/2024 (it should be updated each month when the LoAR comes out). 

The big difference with this tool is that unlike the Google-based tools, it doesn't search an entire LoAR for your terms, it only searches within the text of an individual precedent. In other words, if you search for "sheep and goat", it'll only find items where both "sheep" and "goat" appear in the same LoAR item. Whereas the Google tools will find an LoAR where "sheep" appears somewhere and "goat" appears somewhere else, possibly in completely unrelated precedents. 

Please note that there is no filtering on this of any kind, so anything that's in one of those LoARs should appear, whether it's currently valid or not. One suggestion I have is to click twice on the top of the "Date" column so that it shows you the most recent precedents first. Unfortunately, due to technical limitations, I've been unable to make that a default sort order. Once you've done that once, it should remember the sort order for that browser. 

Also, this is still a little rough around the edges, so if you find any errors, please let me know (Email here or PM via Discord is fine). If it's an actual error message, please try to take a screenshot that includes the entire message AND the entire URL and send that to me, it'll make diagnostics much, much easier.

In service,

Yehuda ben Moshe

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Juliean Galak
jga...@gmail.com