PLS App — Dev Goes On

The first functional preview of the Parallel Life Survey is posted. You can find it at the Akashic Library: http://akashiclibrary.com/books/pls1/

It is running. Soon we will have it working better and better.

The next step in the process is to add more chapters. I thought perhaps we could add 7 more chapters bringing us to 10 total. So if you have already sent in 3 chapters, please send in 7 more. And, if you have not sent in any chapters as yet you can still participate by sending in 10 chapters.

So, I’m looking for chapters 1 through 10 for newbies, and chapters 4 through 10 for folks what have already participated.

While it is true that we will continue improving the interface and function of the PLS app, the real goal in this next test is working out a semi-automated mechanism for handling the incoming chapters.

I say semi-automatic because I don’t hold out any hope for fully automating the process. But, it should be possible to go pretty far in that direction.

Unfortunately, in my effort to save me time and labor that time and labor will be pushed back into the laps of the writers. Sorry about that. But the way the math works out is simple. If I can push 15 minutes each into the lap of 20 writers that saves me 300 minutes. Which, if I do my math correctly, means you taking 15 minutes on your end saves me 5 hours on mine.

I think your 15 minutes extra effort versus my 5 hours of effort saved is worth the trade.

So, here’s the deal.

  1. Send your chapters in a text file.
  2. The name of the text file should be your author_name.txt
  3. Windows users should use notepad to either prepare or inspect your submission.
  4. Inside the file the chapters should be labeled as Chapter 1 or Chapter 2 — note Chapter One or Chapter Two
  5. The chapter headings MUST be on their own line. That means: “Chapter 1 — A young girl sits….” is not good. You would put “Chapter 1” on one line and start a new line with “A young girl sits…” — by the way the quotes were for this blog, not a suggestion that you should have them.
  6. Don’t do anything special with the paragraphs. Out of eight test submissions all of the paragraphs worked just fine. So whatever you are doing with the paragraphs it worked.

Perhaps those of you that are programmers or just plain curious will benefit from some insight into why the above requests.

Request 1 is designed to cleanse the chapters of funny characters that end up looking like weirdo question marks when viewed in the browser. These are characters like the ‘ used in can’t, don’t, etc. It will also cleanse funny quotes and funny double quotes “See Jack run.”  It is important to have these removed so that I don’t have to do any hand editing.

Request 1 will also remove italics and bold. My automatic program is just not smart enough to detect italic and bold. Thus, when the chapter hits the website you will see no italics or bold. You might as well see that in your own editing page so you can make adjustments as necessary. Advanced users can ask for clues on how to compensate. I will give you simple (but confusing to newbs) instructions on how to do that.

Request 1 will also remove any fancy font handling. That will not be happening on the webpage either.

Before I move on, I want to tell those of you that are asking right now: “Hey, why don’t I just write the darn chapter in notepad to begin with?” Well, because notepad does not support images. Also because when it comes time for you to create an eBook out of your project you want those special fonts, weirdo characters and other features not available in in notepad.

Request 2 is made because I plan to use the file name to know who you are. The software will open each file. When it opens the file it will extract the first part of the file name to get your name — or rather the name you want to write under. This name should not be too long. If your name is John Smith you would write the name as John_Smith. The space between John and Smith is replaced by an underline _. It is not replaced by a dash -. The reason for the .txt extension is so that I can easily open the file if need be by double-clicking it in my windows explorer.

Request 3 is made because I have experience with Notepad and know that it will tend to give consistent results. If you insist on a different method, not a problem. Just send me a sample and I will verify if it works.

Request 4 is made because the program will be searching for the text “Chapter #” — this means the word chapter followed by any valid number. The word One is not a valid number. And if I have the program automatically convert One to 1 you could have a sentence like: “Her skin t1 was tan.”

Request 5 is made because the program is not uber smart. That means when it finds “Chapter 1” it will say to itself: “Yeah I found the next chapter, I will not ignore the rest of this line. So some of your precious writing will be lost. That will be bad.

Request 6 is just an observation that so far so good. Later if it turns out we need to do something special I will let you know. But so far so good.

That’s a lot of typing. I hope I’ve explained the needs well. You will notice there are no instructions on how to go about doing this. Let those that know teach those that don’t. Amongst the group there are some pretty experienced folks. They will do great helping the rest of you get through this. You can always email or use my contact form if you are having trouble.

If someone makes a video, I will post it at the bottom of this blog.