After bitching last week about my quotations database, my Muse decided she’d had about enough on the subject. (You’ve probably had enough on the subject, too, but she has 24×7 access to me). I started playing with converting my WIST pages into MT.
It actually turns out that folding the citation name (dates, description) into the quote citation is not that huge of an aesthetic deal, which meant I was able to extract the stuff via an Access query, and embed appropriate HTML (and CSS) code into said extracts. There’s actually some interesting cleverness behind the scenes there, in terms of supporting two different types of entries — quotation entries, and meta-info entries — that I’m kind of proud of, and regardless of how the experiment goes, I’ve learned a lot.
(I’ve also discovered a fun MT plug-in that lets you list categories, explicitly including or excluding some of them. Good stuff.)
The pilot results are now online. Aside from needing to zest up the page a bit, I’m pretty pleased by how it’s turning out.
I’ve run into one (potentially fatal) hiccup in terms of long (150k) entries getting truncated in MT. I’m working at the MT support forums on that.
(Mutter mutter mutter mutter …)
Looks like it’s a browser and/or a MySQL issue that is truncating the input. Crap.
Ooookay … wonder if I can do includes of some sort. Except that’s going to lose me the automatic line breaks that MT will put in.
I could do each letter in multiple chunks — but, damn, what a pain. I was already getting irked at having to do 26 separate entries.
Damn, damn, damn, damn.
Okay … maybe a new tack — each quotation as an entry, with the author as the category, generate an MT import format file. If I can get the Access query to generate line breaks. If there’s a way to flush all the entries. If MT will support 1500-odd categories. If …
(Mutter mutter mutter …)