Author: John Winkelman

On further research, it appears that the HTML Writer’s Guild initiative to mark up the Project Gutenberg eTexts lasted all of four months, from January to April of 2000. They completed a total of 124 works. This means I have my pick of almost six thousand books, poems, and plays, from a variety of formats and genres. I don’t want to start too complex. Romeo and Juliet, with its confusing (to a programmer) mix of play and poetry, is right out. Likewise War and Peace, which is just too damn long. So I need something in a standard format, chapters and paragraphs, and of a length neither intimidating nor bandwidth-hogging.

And the winner is: The Club of Queer Trades, by G.K. Chesterton!!!

Fortunately the volunteers at PG, where the books are initially converted from dead tree to electronic media, are quite good at keeping everything in a standard format. This raises the possibility of writing a script in [PERL | PHP | Python] to do the great majority of the work for me. Surprising, really, that this has not yet been done by someone else.

In other news, the website for From the Heart Yoga should be done within the week. I will then answer the question “how much free coffee is too much free coffee?”. Stay tuned…

This month marks my third year as a web developer/code monkey/whipping boy.

Every year at this time I feel a week or two of angst, because millions of people are in school and I am not one of them. I was a student for close to twenty years, and therefore September 1 is more meaningful to me as a New Beginning than is January 1.

So every September, in an effort to retain the student mindset, I give myself a Big Reading Project; a book I would not likely read, did I not have a GPA hostage to its completion. Anna Karenina was the first. Then The Brothers Karamazov, which I absolutely did not complete. Then Moby-Dick, which I finished, albeit under peer pressure. One year I actually enrolled in a class and studied the bejeezus out of William James.

Plato. Ken Wilber. Bulgakov. Nabakov. And about once a year I take another crack at Dostoyevsky.

About a year ago Scott and I discovered Project Gutenberg , and the HTML Writer’s Guild effort to mark up all of the Project Gutenberg texts into XML. We put together The Shakespeare Transmogrifier (usable across all modern browsers with nifty extras for IE5+/pc users) as an early XML/XSL experiment.

The intuitive among you may see where this is going.

This year, rather than just read a book, I will (probably) take one of the Project Gutenberg text files and convert it to XML. Then I will mirror the file and provide a stylesheet and XSL file with which to transform it into a readable/printable version.

And what are YOU doing this year?

Quick update today. Altered the stylesheet a little, obviously. Also changed the way the photo pages work, in order to get around some absolutely infuriating glitches in, well, every browser out there. And never the same glitch twice. All this from XHTML and CSS which conforms to all the latest standards.

Stupid browsers.

In order to make the pictures work I had to perform a (*gasp*) browser check.

if(document.all) {
 document.getElementById("picCaption").innerHTML = t.value;
 } else {
 document.getElementById("picCaption").innerHTML = t.attributes["value"].value;
 }

The first time I have had to do that on my site in seven months. The sharp-eyed of you will notice that I am using a non-standard HTML attribute, “value”, associated with an image. I figure, XHTML is just a flavor of XML, like MathML, or WDDX. Therefore, it is eXtensible! Why NOT use custom tags? Micro$oft does it all the time. That is why I made the browser-check as insulting as possible by checking for the obsolete (document.all) feature in IE6.

It is done.

The site is updated, everything is in working order.

New feature: The ability to browse to, and therefore link to, individual posts.

XML files are valid XHTML. If I decide to put this method together with a simple content management system, the files will be a snap to update, as long as the user has a minimal knowledge of HTML.

Alternate styles are much easier to implement, as follows:

Start looking for XSL tutorials in the upcoming weeks. As soon as I wake up.

I have been keeping myself crazy busy with restructuring the XML/XSL back-end of es.org. Boy, this stuff isn’t as easy as you might think. Importing XML files and external stylesheets, playing with ISO/Latin characters and unparsed entities… I have begun to speak a language only comprehensible to those poor fools who work in xml and xsl and… and…

*sobs*

On a grander note, I have two personal/collaborative projects coming up soon: First, Master Lee wants a website, and I was volunteered to build it. So Mr. Timmer and I, and possible others, will be building him a site sometime this fall. Also, look for www.fromtheheartyoga.com in the upcoming months. This one I am doing in trade for free coffee.

Can life possible get any better?