15 mm Pecheneg Light Horse (Tin Soldier)

Introduction

These are the latest addition to my "fantasy" early medieval Byzantine army.

I’m describing this as fantasy because I haven’t made my usual effort to ensure historical accuracy. This is partly because the term “Byzantine” covers many centuries, and partly because a large proportion of the figures came from cheap bulk purchases at shows or job lots bought on eBay.

15 mm Byzantine Heavy Cavalry (Essex Miniatures)

Introduction

This is the second batch from the 52 riders I bought on eBay. As with the Georgians before them, they came without horses, so I mounted the riders on a mix of horses from my lead pile and others I picked up from Fighting15s and eBay.

They form another part of my “fantasy” Byzantine army. I call it fantasy because I am making no attempt to be historically representative. The only thing the units have in common is that they all began life as bargain buys at a show or on eBay.

CSV Search And Blog Features

Introduction

For some years I've used Google Sheets to create data tables. I've created quite a few specifically for my blog posts. It's really easy: any tab can be published as a web page and it comes with a unique URL for use in HTML hyperlinks.

I like using them because Sheets can both organise and maintain the data and, once linked to a blog post, everything else is automatic. They are particularly useful displaying tables that are too wide for a standard blog post (600 pixels in my case).

They have one drawback: searching is a bit clumsy. Readers need to know that Ctrl+F will find what they are looking for on most browsers. Even so it's not ideal not least because you can't filter the table.

Enter AI

Last week I did a lot of work indexing the illustrations in the WRG books resulting in a spreadsheet containing 1,322 rows. This was far to long to use without a search or filtering mechanism.

After a bit of research, I found that it's possible to display CSV (comma-separated values) files on web pages without a background database: an ideal solution for Blogger which doesn't offer (or allow) this functionality. All I needed was a code widget I could paste into Blogger as Google Sheets can export any tab as a CSV file..