Automation of the diffusion of heraldic content

2015

The creation of this website is carried out by a builder program developed specifically for Blason.es.

The content that this builder program uses as raw material consists of articles grouped, by armorial owners or by themes, within objects called agendas.

Each agenda can have from 1 or 2 articles up to dozens of them.

An article is often associated with a specific version of a coat of arms, with a bibliographic reference, with a criterion, etc.

Each of the articles stored in the agendas can belong to a wide set of categories.

Of the more than 550 possible categories, approximately 85% can be associated with heraldic and artistic terms or categories.

The articles can also belong to 5 levels that are named, according to the first letters of the alphabet: (A)nnulled, (B)ilingual, (C)astilian and common, (D)istinguished, (E)shelfed, and (F)rontal.

The dozens of agendas containing the Blason.es articles are organized, in turn, in a large tree structure where each node maintains an agenda, the coats of arms, flags, standards, seals, exlibris, etc. described in the articles of that agenda or of other related agendas, the construction method of these coats of arms along with auxiliary notes, hand-drawn tracings of assemblies or components, the diagrams, their pixel images and their representation in vector graphics, their support documentation, their catalogs of heraldic pieces, etc. This tree structure supports and organizes several Gigabytes of heraldic content (about 125 Gb and increasing).

This tree structure was not created to be exploited by the Blason.es builder program, but precedes the existence of this program.

It is, precisely, the same tree structure that supports the development of my heraldic art which, simultaneously, is used by the Blason.es builder program to extract from it the textual, graphic, etc. content that illustrates this website.

Technically, the Blason.es builder program could be classified within the area of metaprogramming and includes, additionally, certain features that try to move it away from determinism, with the objective that the same input information does not always generate identical web content output.

2025

Since the previous paragraphs were written, the fundamentals have not changed, but there has been an evolution.

The raw material feeding my Blason.es website is a 165 GB repository made up of 87,234 files, fundamentally images (raster and vector) created by me, organized in 5,063 cloud directories.

With the best material from that repository, a bilingual documentation base of posts is maintained, which is independent of the posts' final destination, and which currently contains 3,155 posts (titles, set of possible images, bilingual texts in English and Spanish, although also some French, Italian, and other languages, keywords, and control of the sites where they have been published). This documentation base is the source for publishing on the following channels, social networks, and groups within them: Facebook, Minds, Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, BlueSky, Twitter, Pixiv, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Discord, and Patreon and, of course, for the Blason.es website. This allows maintaining a publication volume of 3,224 posts per year (average of the last 5 years).

Specifically, publication on Blason.es is carried out in 2 phases:

• First, thanks to a process programmed in Python which, based on a publication selector, extracts the posts to be published from the document bank with the most suitable images and generates an XML-like structure with said content, including both HTML code and TOL code (a programming language designed by me). That is, it generates a structure like the one described in the previous section, and structure, which was initially edited manually.
• Subsequently, a process programmed in TOL, similar to the one described in the previous section, reads all the XML structure necessary to update Blason.es every night on a server with the Fedora operating system, an operation that is transmitted to the internet early in the morning.

Through the above, Blason.es currently consists of 5,616 HTML pages, 5,282 files in JPEG format, 669 files in PNG format, in addition to MP4 and PDF files.

The pages of Blason.es are organized through a heraldic ontology consisting of 934 keywords in heraldic Castilian and 913 in English heraldic terminology, establishing a network of internal and external hyperlinks that reaches 1,436,823.

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Category: Technology.

At the end of May 2015, I evolved the Css (Cascade style sheet) style pages of this Blason.es website to move from a fixed design to a more flexible and adaptable design.

To ensure that this transformation was not particularly costly, and could be done in a few days, flexibility was limited to 2 ranges of the graphic device width, which is usually called a single breakpoint.

These 2 ranges were primarily set in relation to the content of this site and not so much in relation to the possible desktop equipment or mobile devices on which the content could be viewed.

Within each of these 2 ranges, all adaptation is reduced to linear changes in widths.

In the transition from one range to the other, there is only the disappearance of the outer margins and the adaptation of the size of the initial capital letters and titles.

All this is to avoid overloading the style page code excessively and to keep it as clear and explanatory as possible.

Subsequent to the transformation of the web design from fixed to adaptable, some minor changes have been made, such as, for example, the inclusion of a large capital letter at the beginning of each page with articles.

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Category: Technology.

External link:

• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/.

When the style pages of Blason.es were modified to have a more adaptable and fluid design, this transformation had implications for the images of the coats of arms and those of other heraldic objects shown on this website, which changed from referencing certain display sizes in relation to their height, to being defined in terms of proportions, in relation to the width measurements, between those of the heraldic objects and those of their container blocks.

The builder program, which is referenced in the article titled automation of the diffusion of heraldic content, performed the transformation of most of the images to adapt them to its requirements and display locations.

To do this, the builder program read the large format digital images coming from vector graphics, the spaces within the pages where they had to be inserted, and, after checking that no resolution was lost, generated the image for that space and controls the updates of the coat of arms images, so that, if a new original version is generated, it updates the image displayed on this website, performing, again, the appropriate transformations.

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Category: Technology.

External link:

• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/.

I introduce my heraldic style and coats of arms in pinterest.com/blasones with the following description: «My style as a heraldic artist is clear, simbolic and methodic. Clear because my work searches pieces which transmit energy and vital force to the owner, I think that a coat of arms should be a source of light and joy and an expression of freedom. Symbolic because coats of arms must be a representation of its bearer, his/her ideals, motivations, history and anything he/she might want to display. Methodical because heraldic art is founded on a science, the so called science of heraldry».

The blazons in English are in the following Pinterest's board: pinterest.com/blasones/heraldry-coats-of-arms.

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Categories: Technology and Social networks.

Root: Pinterest.

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (Gustavo Adolfo Domínguez Bastida), «The Mount of the Souls», published for the first time in the newspaper El Contemporáneo, along with 16 more legends, on November 7, 1862.

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It was also edited a year after his death in his book titled «Rhymes and Legends», whose first edition of 1871 was prefaced by Rodríguez Correa and it was initially published in 2 volumes and later in 3 volumes.

The edition used in Blason.es is the one titled «Legends», edited by Ediciones aContracorriente, ISBN 978-84-939129-0-1, Madrid, 2011.

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Bibliographical reference of century XIX.

The author is Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo.

External resource:

• Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer.

Five college degrees from four different universities and a long experience serving patrons from different cultures and traditions is the base of my heraldic practice. My wide range of knowledge and broad praxis are factors of my exuberant creativity. With a blend of strict adherence to tradition whilst hand drawing and an artistic combination of digital imaging procedures, I astoundingly «brings symbols to life».

My artistic style combines hand and digital process and could be drawn with 3 terms: clear, symbolic and methodical.

Clear because his creations transmit energy and vital force to the owner, he believe that a coat of arms should be a source of light and joy and an expression of freedom.

Symbolic because a coat of arms must be a representation of its bearer, his/her ideals, goals, motivations or history.

Finally, my heraldic creation methodology is founded on the science of heraldry and is a guarantee of a professional work.

To advise you on the possibilities of creating your own coat of arms or for any other query you wish to make, you can contact me, without commitment, using the following contact information, you are welcome, and I will be happy to assist you.

The recommended way to contact is using my email address .

• Dr. Antonio Salmeron.
• Mobile phone: (+34) 690 855 320.
• Telephone: (+34) 917 906 868.
• email: .
• Paseo de la Castellana 135, 7^th floor, 28046 Madrid, Spain.

You can also contact me through my Facebook page or my Facebook Messenger or my LinkedIn page.

Castellana 135, 7^th floor, 28046 Madrid, Spain

For some years the concept of «personal brand» has been expanded, a concept that, moreover, is powered by the internet.

The idea of personal branding is based on creating, developing, conveying, and protecting the image and impression you give of yourself to others, both in direct and indirect interaction—whether in person or, for instance, through social media. Your personal brand supports you as a professional when presenting your abilities, as a businessperson in your social relationships, and even in your job search.

This concept of personal branding tells you that you not only need to improve and strengthen yourself as a person or as a professional, but also that others should perceive and remember it. In this way, you can stand out and achieve greater success in your social, business, and professional relationships.

Your personal brand is built step by step; in it, the details matter, and you should also aim for the impression you make to be long-lasting.

For this reason, a personal coat of arms can be an ideal complement to your personal brand. When used wisely, it is, unlike other elements, enduring over time and can enhance and elevate your personal relationships.

The natural way to integrate your coat of arms into your personal brand is not to expect the coat of arms to provide it automatically, but rather to develop it through a cycle of positive feedback, in which your good conduct and professionalism dignify your arms, and your arms, in turn, reflect and communicate that worth continuously.

Continue with: Freedom and legitimacy to adopt arms.