So about 11pm yesterday I sat down to figure out how much work it would be to mark up the Chesterton book into XML. An hour later it was done. You can see it here , in the raw XML form. I expect to have an XSL stylesheet up by the end of the weekend.

Since that one was so easy, I am of a mind to do another. This one will also be a book, as the format is more simple than that of a play or a poem. What shall I pick? Hmmm…

And the winner, weighing in at a respectable 182k, is Marie by Alexandr Sergeevich Pushkin!!

My work on this classic piece of Russian literature is dedicated to Dr. Christine Rydel, of the Grand Valley State University Russian Studies Department, without whose guidance I would never have learned how to get an education in college.

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?