I’ve been doing some more work to the Open Correspondence website (which is now functional thanks to Rufus Pollock’s help). In part I’ve been cleaning up the urls for the data controller (which is still coming along) and trying to tie the views in together. Being happier with Apache and PHP I spent some time looking for how to rewrite the urls until I came across Andre Kollel’s blog post about the internal workings of the middleware in the Pylons framework. The more I do on the project, the more I learn about both Python and Pylons.
One of the next things to do is to reformat the dates into human readable format. I had thought of using Python’s datetime strftime to reformat the date from its current ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD) into day, month year. Unfortunately, the method states ” years before 1900 cannot be used.” A slight cramp in the plan. However there is an Activestate recipe by Andrew Dalke which might do the trick or at least point me in the right direction. It is one of the things to be tidied up at some point.
It is a good feeling to have the site running now. The next task is to write the tests and then to refactor the code. It is very PHPish and needs to be made more Pythonic. I’ve got an idea for trying to create a dendrogram around the textReferred element and to discover the letters and correspondents around the books that Dickens was writing. One of the tings is to continue loading the other volumes of Dickens’s letters into the site. So version 0.2 is a little way off but the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train this time.
Workwise has been a little hectic. I must make some time to write a method to allow our admin team to resubmit applications. Like so many things it is a balance between a five minute job and the two hour ones that need to be done. The major job for the week though was getting the automated printing working.
One of the jobs that admin do is to go through each client and create the packs for them. Using HTMLtools, I’ve managed to compile the html into PDF and then convert the PDF into a PostScript file for a printer. I’ve managed to use the Line Printer Remote protocol to send the job to the printer. It is a simple enough command:
lpr -S <ip address/name of printer> -P <name of print job> (-o <optional -o 1 sets file to binary>) <name of file>
Windows doesn’t appear to support the full protocol but enough to be useful. The -o switch appears to only define whether the file is binary or not rather than specifying the paper type and so on. Annoying but it can be got around.
Anyhow it got me thinking about other ways of using commands to explore how texts can be converted and changed into useful objects. It brings me back to the use of psbook for printing but how to make it useful for an average user who does not necessarily want to run various commands. Having had a conversation with my friend Darren Nash ,editorial director of Orbit books, about the future of publishing; he opined that small presses would come to the fore. I think, certainly in genre that this is correct. It would be interesting to see how existing tools could be used towards these ends rather than constantly re-invent the wheel.
Now that the first version of letters is out the way, time to go over other projects. I’ve got a yen to try and create something from Milton’s Areopagitica, appropriate I think as it is a cry for free presses.
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