I don’t really have anything useful to say about this, it just blew my mind. If 60,000 are published, how many are submitted to publishers and rejected? Good heavens.

There are many questions involved.

The first (and key) question is: Is there enough demand for a downloadable version of, say, the JavaScript 1.5 Reference, to invest a lot of time/effort into producing it? I don’t know the answer to this at the moment, so I’ll ask you: how often do you find yourself in a situation where you want to look something up but can’t because you’re offline and can’t access the MDC wiki?

That aside, the real difficulty begins. By the very nature of wikis, they are malleable. The MDC wiki content changes daily with new edits, corrections, additions, page moves, and deletions. I think that the wiki has, in fact, changed several times every day since it was first launched last March. This is a very powerful feature of the wiki, in that it’s easy to make changes and improvements, and so people do. I might be mistaken, but I’m fairly certain that the MDC currently hosts the most up-to-date version of a JavaScript reference currently in existence (warts and all).

The complicated bit here is that in order to maintain a completely up-to-date downloadable/printable version of any particular collection of content within the wiki, the process of generating that content would have to be wholly automated. One would think that computers would be good at that sort of thing, but evidence appears to show otherwise. I’m certainly not the first or smartest person to think about this problem, and as far as I can tell every other project started towards a solution has been abandoned well before completion.

(Aside: if you know of a current and/or complete project that does what I’m talking about, be it wiki->PDF or wiki->docbook or wiki->xml, please send me a note.)

The good folk over at the Hula project have sort of addressed this issue with their Single Page Administration Guide (warning: it’s a long page…164 pages when saved to PDF). Using wiki includes, they’ve simply collated all the disparate pages into a single long page, which you can then print or save to PDF or what-have-you.

This include-everything-in-a-single-page trick is an OKish solution, in that it does allow people to get a copy of the content that they can then use offline. There are also problems. The table of contents has no page numbers. The page section headings don’t have numbers, so the section numbers in the TOC aren’t very useful. Links aren’t clickable (or even rendered as links) so things like “see Message Store” in the HTML version show up simply as “see Message Store” in the PDF. And so forth.

I think the trick will be figuring out how to turn wiki pages into DocBook XML fragments (using only a simple subset of DocBook elements), then patching those fragments together into full DocBook books. Once the DocBook book is available, there are a host of different tools that can be used to generate it into a variety of formats, including much-more-useful PDFs.

While that seems simple enough on the surface, the number of dead projects that have attempted to do this in a fully automated fashion seems to indicate otherwise.

So, if it can’t be fully automated, could it be partially automated? Could wiki markup be turned into a rough approximation of DocBook fragments which could then be finessed and pieced together by hand?

This is where the first question becomes important. If this requires human intervention, is it worth doing at all? Would it be worth the effort to generate a DocBook version of the JavaScript Reference once or twice per year given that it will be rendered almost immediately obsolete by updates to the wiki?

I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. What do you think? Is it worth it? Is there an easy way to do this wiki->DocBook or wiki->PDF generation that would generate a proper book without requiring a lot of human involvement?

The wiki has been an awesome boon for the state of Mozilla developer documentation. In less than a year over 22000 edits and additions have been made, each of which has served to improve the content we deliver. The web version of the content is XHTML compliant (with occasional markup errors in editing), and it’s relatively usable and friendly with a nice layout. The kicker is trying to turn this incredible resource into usable offline formats. Obviously we don’t want to stop using the wikis, so if we want to generate offline content, we have to figure out how to do that given the tools at our disposal.

And this is apparently what I spend my Friday evenings thinking about.

Parchment Moon

Parchment Moon is a weblog about books, writing, language, and other literary things. Mostly books, tho’. Anyhow. There you go.

Jed wrote poems. Here’s one that was turned into a music video, described as “[a]n unsolicited music video for the band Grandaddy and their song of the same name off of the album The Sophtware Slump“. The punchline? Programmed in Applesoft II on a 1979 Apple ][+ with 48K of RAM. Seriously. It’s brilliant. Seriously.

Monday, of course, is a holiday in Canada, but I’ll end up working part of it since the rest of the world are a bunch of no-long-weekend suckers. Note that I am thus utterly remorseless about a few hours of slackery this afternoon.

Tonight’s fit of writing clocked in at 2048 words, and was largely an exploratory piece about two odd characters who have been poking around my brain for the last few days. It turns out that they actually fit into the story of another character I sketched out recently. Interesting. They’ve even managed to wrap a setting around themselves, so I know where they live, what they do, and what the general environment around them is like.

What’s strange is that everything every writer has ever said about how characters tell you their stories once you start to get into them is absolutely true. (You’d think that after reading it the first 30-40 times I might start to believe it.) One character was born out of a single line of dialogue. I wrote that at the top of the page, then just continued the rest of the scene. That scene turned into another scene which eventually turned into four pages of exploration where she told me all sorts of crazy things about herself. She brought with her a somewhat odd history, a couple of other characters, and an entirely plausible way that she fits in with the other characters I have recently discovered. This is all somewhat unexpected in that when I wrote that line of dialogue at the top of the page, I thought I was working on something in a completely different genre than where it ended up.

Turns out, writing is a hell of a lot of fun.

The first part is that I have started writing again. The plan is this: one thousand words per day, minimum, outside of weblogs and personal journals. The trick here is that the subject matter has to be different. No blithering on for one thousand words about the random crap with which I filled my day. No talking about websites or games or other random crap I found on the internet. This is supposed to be more exploratory stuff — fiction, non-fiction, whatever. Exploration into realms about which I do not normally write. Delving deep into memory and self to carve out pieces and put those on paper. It’s actually a lot less cliche than it sounds.

I’ve been on this new regimen for three days now. The first day I managed to get twenty-one hundred words out before I faltered and fell silent. Day two was seventeen-hundred words. Day three (just now) was another seventeen-hundred. I’m not allowed to cheat, either. If I do two thousand words on one day, it doesn’t mean I get out of the one thousand words the next. Minimum one thousand words, every day. Maximum: unlimited. No carryovers. No touchbacks. Tag.

It has been interesting so far, in that I’ve already found myself thinking about what I could write about at various points throughout the day. I could write about my childhood heros, perhaps, or my recently acquired love of cooking. Maybe I could put out a thousand words about Zen and what it means to me, or at least how I interpret it (which, for what it’s worth, is probably quite unlike what any real Zen student would tell you). How about how I learned to love reading and language? Maybe a piece about my utter disdain for current advertising and marketing and how they’re missing the boat by trying to lie to us incessantly, bombarding us with blipverts that we simply Do Not Believe (seriously, guys, your audience is smarter than you think). I could easily churn out one thousand words about joining a (women-only) gym and starting a new workout regimen (don’t let anyone tell you for even a second that women are less competitive than men). A thousand words about the death and secret rebirth of television as a medium for storytelling. A thousand words about my first trip to the local library (which I haven’t yet done). When I think of it, I jot these ideas down for later retrieval, but haven’t needed to use them yet.

When I actually sit down to write, of course, all bets are off. As yet, there has been no pre-planning. Tonight’s Daily (I’m calling them Dailies) started off with a somewhat vociferous rant against Margaret Atwood which churned itself into a thousand words about Canadian Culture. Yesterday was about cooking, food, dinner parties, and some reflections thereupon. The day before was (quick pause while I go check) about embracing change, later turning into a bit about the strange clash between horror and beauty that we all endure every single day. None of these topics were preselected — they just happened to be what poured out of my brain and into the keyboard while I had the word processor open to a blank page.

Naturally, the vast majority of what I’ve written is utter trash. Breathless at times, totally disorganized, wholly unrevised. Just raw. But that’s ok. For now, that’s all I want — I just want to get into the habit of producing a certain amount of raw content on a daily basis. Writing, you see, has two phases. Generating raw content is, by necessity, the first. The second, which can only happen once the raw content is available, is revising. Unlike sculptors, writers don’t start with a block of material and just spend their time taking away the parts that don’t belong. We need to create the block first, and only then can we start chipping away at the edges. Right now, I just need to produce giant chunks of rough marble.

The second part of my new writerly regimen is this, my weblog. In addition to the one thousand word not-for-other-people minimum, I intend to spend ten to fifteen minutes churning out an entry for my weblog (not including revision and additions). This has two purposes. First, it will mean my weblog gets updated daily, which I’m hoping will draw in more readers. Behind this interminably timid exterior, I really do crave an audience. Second, it will get me used to the idea of actually writing for an audience every day. The one thousand word minimum is all well and good, but if I don’t get used to the idea of having other people actually read my writing, I’ll eventually end up cheating by typing the word “house” a thousand or more times, until the word itself becomes utterly nonsensical and loses all meaning. So, yeah. The weblog entries are intended to keep me at least partially anchored in reality. Writers write to be read. Anything else is just intellectual wanking.

The third and final part of my new regimen involves reading. I used to read a lot. Books upon books every week. I had no TV, I wasn’t caught up in the whole gaming craze, I wasn’t yet jacked into the Matrix (read: Internet). I had a lot of hours to fill, and I gleefully filled them with books. In bulk. When I lived in Montreal I would spend $300-$500 every paycheque on books, often going downtown daily just to browse the bookshops.

Then I stopped reading. Not entirely of course, but from a diet of three or four books per week, I ended up down to about one per month, usually read in ten page increments right before bed. That’s no damned good. I love reading, and so I’m going to make time for it again. I don’t have a minimum daily allotment, but I’d like to be able to spend a couple of hours every day, on average, just sitting on my butt with a book.

And with that, I think I shall.

(43 mins, including revision. 1056 words. So much for 10-15 mins.)

While you’re here, you might as well go read George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language“.

Writing well — like photography, music, martial arts and all other such disciplined human endeavours — is difficult and requires a lot of practice. I need to practice more. I write a lot, but due to the nature of the media I’m usually writing in, I tend not to revise rigorously. Email, weblogs, wikis — all of these are built for speed. Here we have rocket engines and racing stripes on our pens. Disciplined revision is tossed aside as email are dashed off at top speed. Brevity and concision take time, and so are abandoned to the wolves snapping at our heels. Churning out copy by the truckload is fast and easy — the raw materials effortlessly fall out of our heads and into the keyboard — but shaping that material into something of quality is much, much more difficult. These media also allow everyone to be a publisher, so there are few gatekeepers to remind us that sometimes quality counts.

I’m overstating the issue, of course, but the combination of new media and high-speed lifestyles simply encourages quantity over quality. Just this morning I sent out an email that contains a seemingly random comma. It’s just there, right in the middle of a sentence, exactly where a comma shouldn’t be. Had I taken the time to revise properly, that comma would have been extracted before I embarrassed myself in front of dozens of people. I can only hope that everyone reads that mail as quickly as I wrote it.

Writing well takes time, so in order to improve my writing (and photography) I’m going to have to find more time. To find more time, I’m going to have to do fewer things while not letting the remaining things expand to fill all available space. This is where real discipline will be required.

If you’re also interested in improving your writing, you might want to make some time to read these: Fifty Writing Tools.

iTunes pleases me. In the same vein, iPhoto pleases me. Yesterday I decided to finally clear the SD card on my little baby Canon. I plugged it in to the USB port on the back of my keyboard (those are damned handy), and iPhoto automatically opened, set up the import, did the import, and cleared the card all with a single mouse click.

While in California, I picked up a copy of iWork ($79 USD). I haven’t looked at Keynote yet, but Pages is really slick. It’s a full-fledged desktop publishing system akin to Word, only without the eye-stabbingly bad UI. The default UI is all most people need for most word-processing tasks, and it’s just nice and simple. It also has some extremely nice templates, and exports to PDF very nicely. All good.

Oh, in related (ie: software) news, I’ve started maintaining my TODO list in OmniOutliner. Another very slick, very useful, very usable bit of software that just does what it’s supposed to do without getting in my way.

It says something about bad software when one of the defining factors of good software is that it “doesn’t get in my way”. It sure is neat when technology verges on being transparent. I think this is why I like FireFox so much — the default configuration is nothing more and nothing less than what most people need to get around on the web, but there are piles of extensions that allow you to easily add what you want or need (but nothing else).

We sure have come a long way, and yet there’s so much farther to go…

* (While writing up this entry, I’ve also ripped Tom Waits’ Foreign Affairs, and Beautiful Maladies. Not quite sure why they weren’t already in my collection, but they are now, hooray!)

“Keep fighting against the uninformed who think writing – here or anywhere – is a waste of time and effort. If anything will save us, it’s the imagination – and there’s no way better way to keep the imagination alive than to write or to read. My mentor, Thorton Wilder, once said that cruelty is nothing more than a failure of the imagination — and all I can say is that there’s a lot of that going around these days…”

If you’re out there with a drink in hand, give a silent toast to Hunter, TIFF, and Elliott Smith tonight, would you? So much brilliance, too soon taken from us.

I don’t consider myself a “blogger” in the mainstream sense of the word — I have a website of which the core is a diary-like text (you’re soaking in it) which I happen to update more-or-less daily. I too have an intense dislike of “the ugly neologism blog“, and refuse to use it in reference to myself (Merriam Webster bedamned). I also do not, in any way, think that this website makes me a “journalist”, a “columnist”, or really anything that could be accidentally or otherwise confused with some sort of professional, peer-reviewed writer.

Now, that said, Mr. Gorman (the ALA President in question) has penned this article which honestly has the feel and quality of an average “blog” entry. Here are some excerpts (for those of you who cannot read complex texts more than 2-3 paragraphs long):

The Google phenomenon is a wonderfully modern manifestation of the triumph of hope and boosterism over reality. Hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval, Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of “hits” (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order.

Here problem is the statement that Google is “hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval”. Google is a search engine. It is, by far, currently the most efficient means of finding data and information on the web. It is nothing more than that. It is not a library. It does not do anything at all to help us organize, synthesize, or make sense of this information. I don’t know nor have I read about anyone who thinks that Google is anything more than just a really good tool for finding stuff on the web.

There is a difference between information and knowledge, and the keepers of human knowledge shall, I believe, always be human. If anyone thinks otherwise, then they’re wide-eyed fanatics who really don’t understand this sort of thing. Until we have proper AI, forget about replacing librarians. When we do have proper AI, we’ll all be holed up in glowy red bubbles generating electricity for our new robot overlords, so we won’t have to worry about it anyway.

All that said, I’m not really sure what bloggers have to do with Google in the first place.

It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief.

Another sweeping overgeneralization written in anger and intended to paint “bloggers” in a bad light. There is nothing in this sentence that is a) true, or b) not intended to be a direct and ire-rousing insult to the blogging community. This is a combination of a troll and a flame, and not a very good one at that. How is this particular piece of intellectual discourse any better than what we see on blogs every day? (Hint: it’s not.)

Mister Gorman continues with this loaded bit of bait:

Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.

The fact of the matter is that Mr. Gorman wrote something in the past that “The Blog People” disagreed with, and now he’s lashing out. The article he has penned here accomplishes nothing, being little more than an obvious flame and a clumsy troll. It’s already a week old, so maybe I just missed it on its first run through “the blogosphere” (where stories burst forth and die like stars in a time-lapse galaxy), but right now it’s the top story on Slashdot. It’ll peak on blogdex again, I’m sure.

For what it’s worth, I’m somewhat off-put by the growing sense of wide-eyed breathlessness surrounding “the blogosphere”. I’ve found my inner curmudgeon grumpily reading about bloggers suddenly referring to themselves as journalists, or about the strange mob-effect that has caused at least two real journalists (and one fake one) to recently lose their jobs. Dan Rather (and his team) made a mistake. Later they admitted to that mistake and apologized. The man resigned his post, proudly held, in disgrace. The “blogosphere” counts this as a victory.

I do not.

Personally, I’m still working out why I’m being curmudgeonly about blogging and the “blogosphere”. I’ve been reading about journalism and accreditation. I’ve been reading about journalistic ethics and responsibilities. I’ve also been reading about Hunter Thompson and the “New Journalism” that emerged from the 1960s. Reading a lot, and thinking. Thinking about gatekeepers and elitism, about peer-review and “many eyes make all bugs shallow”, about writing and editing, research and fact-checking.

Lots of thinking, trying to formulate a sensible opinion backed up by reasoned thought before writing it up. When I publish it, does that make me a journalist? No. A columnist? No. It makes me a woman with a website and an opinion, nothing more.

Hm.