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Golem Herald Procedures

Home Page > Information for Heralds > Senior Staff Job Descriptions > Golem > Golem Procedures

The Golem Herald is responsible for:

The following are overviews of what the Golem Herald does, created by the current Golem Herald, Hirsch von Henford, with the goal being to assist a successor. Anyone who takes on the office of Golem will hopefully get some training, and the current Golem Herald is working on documenting in detail each individual part of what is below, which will be stored in a location that can be accessed by the senior staff, and/or Golem's successor.

The Golem Herald needs to have general understanding of how the Internet and websites work, at least a basic understanding of HTML and CSS. They should have a good understanding of using Word, particularly for the Ceremony Books (see below). It is useful -- but not required -- to understand PHP and some other web coding techniques if the Award List code needs updating. There are a few places where, for example, a region or local branch may be hard-coded (written into the program) because the lookups get complicated.

Under some of the headings will be a link to a Word document on the Heralds' site. These documents break down how things work in great detail, and are meant to assist you in learning how to do the job. If you click the link the file will download directly to the folder used by your browser for the default download location -- you can find it from the browser itself, if you click the download button in the icon bar at the top. Note: The links to the Word documents have been removed for the time-being, as each of these documents needs a complete makeover due to changes in July/Summer of 2026 to this site.

West Kingdom Awards List/Order of Precedence

The current Court Report procedure can be found at: Court Reporting Procedure.

Golem should view the documentation in the Awards List database for details on the procedures for updating the data, and updating the Awards List on the Herald's website. Any new person taking on this office should be trained by the previous Golem Herald on how to use the site, however, most of it is programmed to be as straight-forward as possible. As the data is live, you should not experiment, any changes made will be immediately available. (If you wish to "experiment", it is possible to set up a copy of the database on a Windows-based computer, but that is relatively involved, details are available in a folder that has all of the Heralds' website files that should be copied to your local computer when you take the job.)

The awards list database can be backed up (and should be) regularly from the administrator's userid, by clicking "Data" in the menu, and the only option there should be "Backup". This creates a .SQL file that needs to be downloaded. If the data needs to be restored, use the most recent .SQL file (the date and time the backup was created are part of the filename), and follow instructions that are found in a Word document in the information provided to Golem. Note: with the move to Google Sites, this option may no longer work.

A detailed breakdown of working with the Award List can be found in the Word document: "Golem Procedures -- Award List.docx" -- if you need this, it should be with files that the Golem Herald has.

West Kingdom Herald's Handbook

The Herald's Handbook has been converted to HTML, except for a couple of items that need to be printed exactly as is, in which case they are in PDF format, and the Word documents are kept locally.

The Baldric Herald should work with senior staff heralds to be sure that anything in the handbook is correct and up-to-date. The Golem Herald is then responsible for ensuring that the individual web pages are updated correctly. Some knowledge of HTML and CSS is useful for this.

Updates are rare, and some of the links on the Herald's Website are actually to off-site locations, such as the SCA College of Arms Rules for Submission. It made more sense to just reference the Laurel Sovereign of Arms website, rather than trying to constantly update a local copy.

West Kingdom Ceremony Book

The Ceremony Book is in a set of Word documents. It is also quite large. However, to make things easier, the sections of the handbook are kept together in single files. This is important to keep the page numbering correct, and updating the table of contents for each section. Note that knowledge of Word, and familiarity with working with Tables in Word is very important here. The Word documents use a set of styles (Word Styles) which are defined in a Word document in the files provided to Golem their successor.

The Ceremony Book is laid out in tables, and uses section breaks in Word for some of the more complex ceremonies, to keep them grouped together, and deal with headers/footers.

The whole thing relies heavily on using the bookmarks in Word to set up cross-references for award ceremonies and the table of contents. Make sure after updating, especially if you add a new ceremony, or change the paging of the ceremony book, that you re-generate the cross-references (Ctrl+A to "select all", and then press F9, if asked about updating the Table of Contents have "Update entire table".

Make sure you update footers for the dates that the document(s) were changed. Hint: a simple replace for the whole document should update all the footers ...

PDF files are generated from within Word (no need for an extra software package as in the past, Word can create PDFs directly). You need to generate a full document of the complete ceremony book for each section that you update (West Kingdom Ceremonies, Principality of the Mists Ceremonies, etc.), and then you need to generate PDF files for each of the individual ceremonies. This is more important if the page count gets changed ... if what you do is make some minor wording changes and the page count has not been seriously altered, you can generate just the individual ceremony(s), and the full document.

Make sure you update the index pages on the Herald's Website for each section of the Ceremony Book that you updated.

Currently there are four separate ceremony books:

  1. West Kingdom
  2. Principality of the Mists
  3. Principality of Cynagua
  4. Principality of Oertha

A detailed breakdown of working with the Ceremony books can be found in the Word document "Golem Procedures -- Ceremony Books.docx" -- if you need this, it should be with files that the Golem Herald has.

Herald's Website

This seems like it should be fairly difficult. However, if Golem is familiar with basic HTML/CSS, most of the website is not too difficult to manage.

Golem hand-modifies the pages, as software for managing websites can get expensive, and isn't really necessary. One exception to this is the Awards List, which is PHP (and a variety of other programming) code.

The Herald's Website uses a single cascading stylesheet (WKHeralds.css), which should always be referenced in the "head" section of your HTML documents. This document contains simple a body tag that sets the background to white (forces it), sets the default font, etc. It also includes the PageTitle, SecondaryHeader, and TertiaryHeader styles. The advantage to using the style sheet is that you can change the appearance of the whole website by making changes in the style sheet, and uploading it to the herald's website. This is much easier than changing each individual page one at a time.

Heralds' Meeting Minutes need to be posted in as timely a fashion as possible (depending on Matins/Green Crown).

A detailed breakdown of all of this can be found in a Word Document: "Golem Procedures -- Website.docx" -- if you need this, it should be with files that the Golem Herald has.

Work with the West Kingdom Historian

Not an obvious item, but the Who's Who for the West Kingdom, stored on the History website, is linked into the Awards List (or vice versa, the Awards List is linked into the Who's Who), by a field associated with each individual listed. When someone's armory is registered (via the Letter of Acceptances and Returns, produced monthly by the SCA College of Arms), the Golem Herald should work with, or perhaps have a login to the History site as an administrator, and ensure that registered names are spelled correctly, and add the registration date (MM/YYYY); and that armory is correct (including changes to blazons), noting the registration/change date (MM/YYYY). The image that is registered for the armory should be uploaded appropriately. (Note, this includes badges, which are added/edited on the "Other Armory" tab ...)

If someone is new to the Awards List, an email is sent to the Historian with the information the Golem Herald entered (name, modern name if known, location, and the value of the linking field (a numeric value)) -- this is automatic, you need do nothing for the email to be sent). The Golem Herald should check to see if they are in the Who's Who, and if so, add the link ("Awards Name Code"), from the Awards List (upper right corner of the "Name and Related Information" tab on the administration pages for the awards list for each individual). These numbers must match. So when you add a person to the Award List, after you save the record, "Name Code" will be automatically created and displayed on the screen. Copy that information into the Who's Who page, if needed. That way the name and armory information will appear correctly in the Awards List for that individual.

A detailed breakdown of how to update the Who's Who on the History site can be found in the Word document "Golem Procedures -- History Site.docx" -- if you need this, it should be with files that the Golem Herald has.

Work with Kingdom IT

The Kingdom IT team (and it is a team) needs to be notified when a senior staff herald office changes hands, so that the email forwarding (such as: vesper@heralds.westkingdom.org) is updated to the email address the new officer wishes to receive email at. By using these email forwarding addresses, it means that we don't need to update the actual email address people use to contact the individual officers in all the locations (Kingdom Website, The Page, etc.). It is meant to make things easier in the grand scheme of things, but it does mean that Golem needs to make sure that they email the IT team (Email the communications@westkingdom.org address) or web team that an officer changed happened, name, and new email address, and ask that the previous officer's email address be removed (otherwise that officer will continue to receive the emails for the current officer, which can be frustrating).

Bibliography (Word Documents)

All the Word Documents mentioned above are listed below, to make it easier to find them. Note: These links have been removed for the time-being, as each of these documents needs a complete makeover due to changes in July/Summer of 2026 to this site, and are no longer kept on the website itself.

Golem Herald Job Description Senior Staff Heraldic Job Descriptions Main Herald's Web Page