Well, in the end I had to replace my sound card, break out the soldering iron to fix an XLR cable, and record only between 2 and 5 a.m., to prevent the dulcet tones of South Van Ness from overwhelming the narrative, but it’s finally finished — and I hope I never do anything like this ever again. (Actually, I know in a few days the irregular audio will bother me enough I’ll be compelled to fix it, but for the moment I’m fantasizing I’m free.)
And while I’m at it, whose bright idea was it to call this ‘data deduplication’ instead of, say, ‘Bob?’ Do you have any idea how difficult it is to say ‘deduplication’ repeatedly? Even now, several of the takes are ones in which I didn’t mangle the term too badly. If I’d kept at it until I managed to nail that word every time, it would have been next Summer before the video appeared. (Here’s a sneak preview of version 4.0 of my deduplication routines: They’re called ‘Bob.’)
It’s a long video — around 22 minutes, as I recall — but it’s thorough: Each of the component dedupe ‘modules’ is discussed, with an animation detailing each routine’s process flow, followed by a narrated screen capture sequence illustrating how the functionality evinces itself within Airtable. I tried to put together a shorter introductory video consisting solely of the capture portions, but it weighed in at nearly 15 minutes. I’ll probably throw together a barebones, screen cap intro eventually, once the memory of this one had faded. In the meantime, feel free to fast forward.
Undoubtedly, self-hosting the video means someone out there won’t be able to watch it. Unfortunately, at the moment I’ve somehow managed to screw up my Google credentials to the point where I can’t verify I’m me and thus enable uploads of longer than 15 minutes. Once I figure out what I did wrong, I’ll relocate this to YouTube. (In the meantime, for anyone having trouble viewing it from my server, it exists on YouTube in a ‘Part 1’/‘Part 2’ version.)
I want to emphasize, though, this video is intended to accompany the users guide, rather than replace it. That document can be found here. It’s been updated recently, but only to include the video URLs found in this reply.
Full video: http://paladesigns.com/airtable/dedupe/
Alternative part 1: https://youtu.be/1IQBNKidE0k
Alternative part 2: https://youtu.be/6bHT3CLclAM
