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20th June 2009

Music & Moods

Scarborough Fair - The Ballad

Scarborough Fair is an English folk song dating back to the late medieval times or Renaissance period, the time of growing cities and flowering mercantile ports. As the dark ages drew to a close the seaside resort of Scarborough was an important and prosperous harbour city and port for tradesmen from all over England. Scarborough was originally known as Skarthaborg by the norman Skartha, from well over a thousand years ago.

The song was sung by Bards (or shapers) who travelled from town to town to entertain the swelling audiences. Scarborough was famous for its yearly fair — a big forty-five day trading event in August and September — to which the song title refers.

The song is written in the Dorian Mode. Read more about the Dorian mode in music and history.

18th June 2009

We are giving the traditional Ultrapedia website interface a facelift, with new and more interesting ways to navigate, discover and explore history through the Ultrapedia Library. We've set a test system up for you to try - you can try it out by clicking here.

As an example take a look at our Music and Moods page, were there is a feature on the brilliant German compser J S Bach, with links to books in the library on the composer, and music and video links to some of his compositions.

We appreciate your comments and feedback, so if you have something to say please add your comments to the blog announcement here.

The Ultrapedia Team

Recently, we've concentrated on improving the speed and load times of the website. We've installed and upgraded both hardware and software as well as numerous application tweeks, leading to overall improvements in system reliabilty, performance and stability.

The new system brings better search and drill down capabilities and also a brand new feature - parametric browsing - still in its early beta test stages. However for a taste of whats to come you can try parametric browsing by clicking here.

You will find more Collections in the left hand side panel on the search results page. Some suggestions are offered in the 'Are you looking for' section at the top of the side panel. Other Collections include Book Title and Author, Genre, Publisher, ISBN, ASIN, LCCN and Release Year. Old Bookmark favourites of People, Place and Footnotes remain. Each Collection is expandable by clicking on 'more' at the end of each section; clicking the 'X' will exclude it from the search results.

The new site is designed to improve the retrieval of information within the books in our library.

The Ultrapedia Team

The final and second phase of migrating the Ultrapedia Library to its new home at www.ultrapedia.com is complete, and all visitors to www.pointmore.com are re-directed here.

Almost 10,000 new documents have been added to the library during September and October, and we continue to add about 1000 new documents a week.

On the Search Results page are links for two additional file formats - RTF and HTML - alongside PDF file format. Clicking on the RTF link will download a copy of your chosen file in RTF format; clicking the HTML link will display the file in HTML format. More formats will be added in the coming weeks, including LIT - the Microsoft eBook Reader, and IPD - for the Blackberry.

Comments and feedback can be added to the Ultrapedia BLOG

Drilldown Changes

We've modified the drilldown functionality in 'Quick View', and we think you'll agree its much improved. Here's a rundown of the changes.

Search Results Page - Quick View - Side Panel Bookmarks

In 'Quick View' clicking on a bookmark in the side panel to the left, initiates a search based on the selected bookmark - returning a list of relevant books in the main content window. Previously it would jump to the occurrence of the selected bookmark within the text.

Search Results Page - Quick View - Main Content Window

All the books in the Ultrapedia Library are recognized and stored so as to retain the same page formatting and fonts as the original book. The entire Ultrapedia Library has also been spell-checked and corrected with an overall success rate of approximately 95% over the entire collection.