The Harry Potter Lexicon

Last night I finished entering Quidditch Through the Ages into the Portkey database. That’s the last of the books to be entered, so now the Portkey covers all seven novels and the two Schoolbooks, as well as all the Famous Wizard cards. Surprisingly, there was actually an earthquake just a few moments after I entered the last part of the book into the Portkey. Kind of made it feel like a momentous occasion.

The Daily Prophet newsletters are next. The first issue is partly entered already. I think I’ll do some non-Portkey work on the Reader’s Guides first, though. There are a lot of chapters that have no commentary yet. Just remember, Reader’s Guide commentary automatically appears in the Portkey entries for the passages from the books, just another example of how the Portkey pulls everything in the Lexicon together in one easy-to-use research tool.

With yesterday’s emphasis on Quidditch, I’ve been muddling about with the Portkey, adding information to the Timeline, and testing out how it all fits together. When I add a date to the Timeline, for example, it’s supposed to appear on the Timelines tab of the associated Portkey entries.

I tend to work in outline mode, by which I mean that I go to the “Book Outlines” menu and choose the book I want to work with. When I click on a book (or other canon source), the Portkey shows me the full organized list of events from that source. So while I’m adding things to Quidditch Through the Ages, I keep the outline of that book on my Portkey screen.

As part of that process, I was adding information about Gwenog Jones, the brilliant but dangerous captain of the Harpies. I went through the various places she appears and tagged her on those entries, some of which hadn’t been tagged or iconned yet. Then I did a search of the Portkey for ‘gwenog jones’. I thought the thing had quit on me. It took over sixty seconds to do the search, and there was nothing on the screen to indicate that the search was still going on. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.

Obviously, this needs some tweaking. The search should be faster, although as the amount of information increases, that may be a problem. But some sort of “Search in progress…” notice on the screen would also be very helpful. I don’t currently have a programmer to work on those things, but when I find one, I’ll see what can be done.

In the meantime, if you do a search of the Portkey for a term (as opposed to an advanced search, which goes much faster), please be patient. The Portkey might look like it’s choked, but it’s just busy searching through a LOT of information. And if you know of a good programmer who might want to help with this, let me know.

Steve

Over the years, there have been a number of strange Quidditch matches played, many of them famous for their length or some odd circumstances surrounding them. Since February 22 is the anniversary of one of the strangest Quidditch matches in the Harry Potter books, I thought I’d mention it here, along with some other odd Quidditch games in history.

November 9, 1991 - a most unusual catch
Harry plays his first ever Quidditch match and ends the game by catching the Snitch in his mouth. This Snitch unexpectedly became an important artefact years later when Dumbledore hid one of the Deathly Hallows in it and bequeathed it to Harry in his will.

1269 - Bragge gives the players the bird
During a Quidditch match played in 1269, the Chief of the Wizard’s Council releases a Golden Snidget bird and offers 150 Galleons to whichever player can catch it. This added a new dimension to the game, with the result that Snidgets became endangered.

1884 - Lost on the moors
In a remarkable match where both Seekers played very poorly, the Snitch escaped on Bodmin Moor and was lost on the moor for six months. Some say it’s still out there somewhere. In fact, Bodmin Moor has a legend of some sort of unidentified beast wandering the moor, which may have been where Rowling got the idea.

1953 - The finest match ever played
The Holyhead Harpies defeated the Heidelberg Harriers in a seven-day match that ended when the Harpy Seeker, Glynnis Griffiths, finally caught the Snitch. The captain of the Harriers immediately proposed marriage to the captain of the Harpies, but was refused with a blow to the head.

1921 - Fastest catch
Roderick Plumpton, the Seeker for the Tutshill Tornados, caught the Snitch in three and a half seconds in a match against the Caerphilly Catapults. He says it was intentional, but opinions vary.

February 22, 1992 - oddest Quiddtich match in the books
No, it isn’t the one where Luna comments on cloud formations and accuses Zacharias Smith of suffering from ‘Loser’s Lurgy’. This was Harry’s second match, played against Hufflepuff. What was strange about it? First of all, it was played so late in the afternoon that it was dark shortly after the end of the match, and Harry caught the Snitch in record time. Normally Hogwarts matches are played at 11 am. If this match had been played out to normal length, they would have been playing in the dark. Even stranger was that fact that Snape was allowed to referee the match, although he had a very strong bias against Gryffindor and assigned penalties against them for no particular reason. This is the only time in the entire series when we see Snape on a broomstick. ETA: Phil noted that we do see Snape on a broomstick during the Battle of the Seven Potters, recalled in the “Prince’s Tale” chapter of DH.

Related Searches:

Timeline search for Quidditch

Portkey search for Quidditch

Note: We’re still adding information to the Portkey and Timeline databases. As they information is added, it automatically shows up in various entries which are related, which is pretty cool. While entries exist for the entire series of novels, they haven’t all been ‘iconned’ or tagged, so this search will change and improve over time. Also, I’m still adding entries for the last part of Quidditch Through the Ages and for the Daily Prophet newsletters. Try the searches again ever so often to see what’s been added.

Questions have been asked and accusations made which require some kind of response. Specifically, I have been accused of lying in my declaration. This is a very serious charge. I want to make a clear statement of the facts.

In my declaration, I wrote that the income from the advertising on the Lexicon has “…covered the cost of operating the web site.” I never said that the income pays for hosting. What I said is that the income covers the cost of running the site, not hosting it. The costs of running the Lexicon are not great and they vary month to month. The money that comes in from advertising covers it. This ad revenue will also pay for hosting, which I have been trying to set up but have been prevented from doing.

I want to be as clear about this as I can. The Lexicon has had a link to Amazon for a few years and Google ads for the past 18 months. The amount of income from those ads varies quite a bit, but has averaged about $115 per month for the last year or so. I also have an ad on the Lexicon for the Cauldron Shop, the proceeds from which go to The Leaky Cauldron from which they pay for the hosting.

I have never bothered to track expenses, nor do I deduct them for tax purposes, so I don’t have an itemized list of what the ad revenue has paid for. However, I can give you some examples: the purchase of software and hardware including photo software, website management software, and a new keyboard and mouse; computer maintenance; postage for sending things to staff; internet charges (both normal monthly charges and separate charges at hotels or campgrounds when I’ve been traveling); various books and other reference materials; and other such things. After these expenses, the rest doesn’t even cover the taxes I’ve paid on that money.

Before there were ads on the site, I paid all the expenses myself. Since the ads have appeared, the revenue has gone to cover the cost of running the site. If there was any income to me, it wasn’t much, especially by comparison to the income other websites have earned. Emerson Spartz, for example, has stated in an article in Business Week that he makes a “six figure income” from Mugglenet.

I ask everyone to consider the facts before rushing to judgment.

Steve

ETA: I am baffled how this calm explanation of facts could be blown so out of proportion. I do not want to drag Leaky into anything. The reason I am trying to arrange for the change of hosting is to allow Leaky to keep itself separate. The only reason that the finances question was brought up at all in the filings for the case was to show that the Lexicon, like other Harry Potter websites, does indeed bring in some money and is therefore a commercial venture. That statement certainly wasn’t intended to drag Leaky into the matter.

No one from the Leaky Cauldron has ever asked us to pay toward our own hosting until now. When the Cauldron Shop was created, it was stated clearly to the other Floo webmasters that the CS was intended to support all the Floo sites. We were never told how much hosting cost or how much the Cauldron Shop brought in. As far as we knew, everything was working out just fine. There were still some costs to running the Lexicon, however, and so I put Google ads on the site to help cover those. The ads were there for over a year and no one from Leaky ever mentioned them. If they would have asked, I would have been happy to show them the records of the small amount of money coming in and if they would have asked for a share, we would have talked about it. They never said anything.

When Melissa informed me that the Lexicon needed to take over its own hosting, I considered a number of offers. She connected me up with someone from Idologic and eventually I agreed with her that it would be the best option. So I contacted that person and we exchanged a couple of emails. He said he needed some more information about bandwidth and the like and that he would get back to me. This was in December. I heard nothing back from him until January. I told Melissa about this delay and she assured me that no one was in any hurry, that Leaky only wanted the transition to be as smooth as possible. This is the kind of relationship the Lexicon and Leaky have always enjoyed.

It is true that it’s been several weeks since that contact and I am only getting around to making the switch now. Quite honestly, I’ve been very busy and I didn’t get to it as quickly as I probably should have. However, I had no reason to think that this was a problem, based on the conversations I’d had with Melissa. Once the legal filings were completed, I turned back to other tasks, and this was one of them. There is no connection between the filings and my getting to work on the change of hosting except for the fact that I had to finish one before I had time to work on the other.

If Melissa will feel better waiting to switch the hosting until after the hearing, that’s fine, although I can’t understand how that will help keep Leaky separate. I completely agree that Leaky shouldn’t be in any way involved in this case and should try to be completely neutral. Melissa and I have always worked well together, as she said, and I am so sad that this situation has damaged that relationship. I hope that this statement can help calm the storm a little.

Steve