It’s a project calendar for keeping track of (a) which projects I’m working on and (b) when I’ve worked on them. That way I can easily see where my time is spent and possibly where I need to adjust things. (“Looks like I’m neglecting my writing. Time to fix that.”)
I started out using the back of my Field Notes notebook, since it has a handy grid, but I ran into a problem: when I finish the notebook, I no longer have my project calendar with me.
Enter Google Spreadsheets:
The grey boxes mean that the project has ended. Each month is its own sheet, which keeps things tidy. (Projects that end don’t need to be on the next month’s sheet.)
And the best part? It’s super easy to maintain. I can just copy and paste the black boxes, and when I start a new month, it only takes a few seconds to clear out the boxes and change the days of the week.
Speaking of tracking things, I forgot to blog about my writing log (which I used to use back when I was writing more frequently):
I’m also planning to make a grid-based log for scripture reading and family history and other church-related things I want to do more diligently.
Another project announcement: The Standard Works, a web-based keyboard-controlled scriptures reader (the Book of Mormon, the Bible, the Doctrine & Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price).
The app itself is located at https://bencrowder.net/scriptures/ and is about 90% done, but I’m not sure when I’ll have time to finish it up so I’m kicking it out of the nest and getting it out there.
The code was pretty much just thrown together; if I were to use this in an actual app, it’d be much cleaner. And for some reason it doesn’t quite work in Safari 4, so you’ll need to use Firefox 3.5.
As for next steps, I’m going to try to rewrite the demo using Processing.js. I’m also planning to extend it to allow panning (so you can have a huge pedigree chart onscreen — some of the Flash-based pedigrees out there do the same thing), and I’m itching to do some kind of genealogy demo ala Snow Stack (Safari only).
We just released issue six of my magazine, Mormon Artist. This issue has interviews with Patrick Madden, Rick Walton, Cambria Evans Christensen, Perla Antoniak, Debra Fotheringham, and Danor Gerald, and we’ve also got an article by Menachem Wecker and an essay by Patrick Madden.
And we’ll have our special contest issue out within the next few weeks, too. After this we’re moving to publishing four times a year instead of six, which’ll hopefully work out better.
It’s hard to believe it’s been a year already. Wow. A year ago I had just a little smidgen of hope that the magazine would still be around twelve months later, and now it blows my mind to think that we’ve profiled almost fifty artists. Crazy.
Back in May, I posted about Words of the Prophets: Selected Sermons from the Book of Mormon, a book I was typesetting. Well, it’s done. It’s available as a PDF from my website or on Lulu as a perfect-bound paperback.
The Lulu edition is 5.5×8.5″ and uses publisher-grade paper (it’s white, pretty much like standard printer paper, and happens to be a bit cheaper). Eventually I’ll do a 6×9″ edition using Lulu’s standard cream-colored paper, but for now this will have to do.
Not too long ago I downloaded Eucalyptus, a slick new ebook reader for the iPhone. I love it. I didn’t think anything could knock Stanza down from being king of the hill in my ebook-reading world, but Eucalyptus did it and with style.
Caveat: Eucalyptus can only read books from Project Gutenberg. But that’s not really a problem for me, since most of what I wanted to read was on there anyway. (Well, most of what I wanted to read that already happened to be free.)
Fast forward to this morning. I’m Mormon, and I want to read more Mormon-related texts. I searched around on Project Gutenberg but only found six or seven books — the Book of Mormon (of course), James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ and The Story of Mormonism, and then some outsider and/or anti works. Hardly anything.
I want to change that.
There are lots of public domain (pre-1923) texts related to the Church which would be valuable to make available for free, so my new goal is to start digitizing them and putting them into Project Gutenberg. (So I can read them in Eucalyptus.)
Yes, yes, I’m aware that there are already places like GospeLink with plenty of these texts. That’s great, but I want Mormon books in Project Gutenberg, and so far that hasn’t really happened. It’s been seven years since I submitted The Story of Mormonism to Project Gutenberg, and the number of Mormon-related texts added since then (if any) is paltry at best.
I’m going to start building a list of the books I think should be added, and if you have any additions, let me know. (The only real stipulation is that there has to be at least one edition of the book published before 1923, to ensure that it’s out of copyright.) First on my list is John A. Widtsoe’s Joseph Smith As Scientist. I also plan to add the D&C, Pearl of Great Price, and eventually the Journal of Discourses.
I’ll also be developing my Unbindery web app as part of this, and I’ll need volunteers to help with proofreading. When that part is ready, I’ll let you know, but if any of you do want to help out, shoot me an email and I’ll add you to the list.
Last but not least: I like naming things, mainly so I have a way to talk about them. To that end, then, I’m going to call this the Mormon Digitization Project. Here we go.
