As part of the XML, I’ve been using the TEI mark-up for the letters. I once hard this described as “XML for people who don’t think XML is flexible enough”. Now I can see why. It is a highly flexible solution to digitising texts but can be confusing, especially when switching between versions. I believe the original model that I had been working on was P4 but the current one is P5 so I had to negotiate that change and to make sure that I had the correct elements in the blocks. Even then, there can be two or three different versions of the same element in the section and I do have to wonder about that wisdom rather than simplifying the elements so that there are the extensible elements that may or may not be used. I’m intending to use the schema again and to really get my head around it rather than tinkering on the edges.

I’ve attempted this conversion before but think that I’ve finally got it to a point which is nearly there. What I would really like to do is to put together some sort of tool kit as a core to the Open Correspondence project. Clearly this would be a long-term project and would need more research but it might be useful to other projects.

As well as marking up texts, it would be useful to use the XML mark-up to convert the text into other formats such as Mobipocket or the Kindle formats to allow a user to create their own e-publication. It would also be useful to find a way of using the XML in conjunction with the psbook command to create a print version of a letter or collection. This does mean that I need to convert the XML into a PostScript file (which raises a host of questions at the moment – such as converting structured format into layout format) and then print it.

I’ve also been playing around with the correspondent collections and the way of marking up collections in TEI. I had thought of this as working on creating printable collections and making the data re-usable for printing. Equally it might allow the data to be used in answer to Jonathan Gray’s question regarding identifying the letters written to a particular correspondent.

When I can get the XML working and validated, then I’ll look at the JSON output. It would draw a line under this part of the project and allow me to move on. I’m aiming for a release towards the end of March or middle of April in keeping with trying to keep into a six week schedule.

The next thing after that is to begin answering Jonathan’s questions in terms of a tool kit to identify weaknesses and to try and write some code to re-use and re-mix the data. I would hope that would be in the next release towards the end of May.

Still working on the accounts project which keeps unravelling a series of underlying problems. Most of them we know about but they appear in all sorts of odd places.

Assuming the world doesn’t fall on my head next time I’m in the office, I’m going to try and spend the day at home on a “Fedex” day. I’m taking the notion from an issue of Wired where they were talking about different ways of working and Atlassian mentioned “Fedex” days where you spend a day building a prototype. What I’d really like to get prototyped is the service bus / queuing system. So fingers crossed.

The impetus came from updating the disaster recovery documentation and writing the first department of the service status documentation (which I wrote after getting the last bit of debugging finished). I know that documentation is not everybody’s favourite thing but I find it useful in rethinking the system and making sure it fits together.

I’ve made time to rewrite the load function for Open Letters. I’ve got the document building the letters in XML and written a rough upload script. Next task is to rewrite the main.py script, test the XML loading and then finished tidying up the initial document.

I’m also looking forward to Textcamp so it’ll be great to get the load finished (as it normalises the function) and get on with doing a presentation for the camp.

I’m also coming to end of writing my book on children’s fantasy. Whilst not technical in an IT sense, I’m thinking of the next project on the New Weird and how to use IT to visualise influences and timelines. The one that worries me is archiving necessary web pages for the research which I need to look towards as I’m not sure whether it is technically illegal.

I’ve also managed to complete a SOAP service in PHP to listen for status updates and just doing the final tests to it now. Once its up it can be repurposed for other companies. One of the things that I think  will come up is how to store XML files most efficiently as MySQL 5 appears to be tied to uploading files rather than just taking POST strings. I’m thinking of using something like Oracle’s BDB XML database (though the license appears to preclude our uses) or eXist but that is something to come back to much later.

I’ve been thinking about the Open Correspondence site and the best way to allow it to be extended by other people. I think that the best way forward to create an internal XML format which the load command can use and anybody can use to create their own files and databases. Its along the lines of the stuff I partially did some work on in the Open Shakespeare project.

Given the boss is away, time for finishing more things off next week. I’ve also created a Trac instance for internal purposes but I think it’ll help on that bane if developing live – documentation.