I've reached a point in my development project at which I'd like to go ahead and release FromThePage as Open Source. There are now only two things holding me back. I'd really like to find a project willing to work together with me to fix any deployment problems, rather than posting my source code on GitHub and leaving users to fend for themselves. The other problem is a more … [Read more...] about Open Source vs. Open Access
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Who do I build for?
Over at ClioWeb, Jeremy Boggs is starting a promising series of posts on the development process for digital humanites process. He's splitting the process up into five steps, which may happen at the same time, but still follow a rough sort of order. Step one, obviously, is "Figure out what exactly you’re building." But is that really the first step? I'm finding that what I … [Read more...] about Who do I build for?
Progress Report: One Month of Alpha Testing
FromThePage has been on a production server for about a month now, and the results have been fascinating. The first few days' testing revealed some shocking usability problems. In some places (transcription and login most notoriously) the code was swallowing error messages instead of displaying them to the user. Zoom didn't work in Internet Explorer. And there were no … [Read more...] about Progress Report: One Month of Alpha Testing
Name Update: FromThePage.com
I've finally picked a name. Despite its attractiveness, "Renan" proved unpronounceable. No wonder my ancestors said "REE-nan": it's at least four phonemes away from a native English word, and nobody who was shown the software was able to pronounce its title. FromThePage is the new name. It not as lovely as some of the ones that came out of a brainstorming session (like … [Read more...] about Name Update: FromThePage.com
Progress Report: Subject Categories
It's been several days since I updated this blog, but that doesn't mean I've been sitting idle. I finished a basic implementation of subject categories a couple of weeks ago. I decided to go with hierarchical categories, as is pretty typical for web content. Furthermore, the N:N categorization scheme I described back in April turned out to be surprisingly simple to implement. … [Read more...] about Progress Report: Subject Categories