The original reason for starting the website www.ipsissima-verba.org/ was to provide a place to archive Latin texts and translations. I wrote the original PHP software myself, and it was highly specialized for this task.

Once I made the switch to Drupal for content management, I could no longer achieve the same functionality, but the advantage was a stronger and more generic overall architecture.

Having learned a little bit about Drupal module writing for the Kenrick Liturgical Ministries website, I decided to try to improve the Latin Text Archive.

I now have the site in a much more usable configuration. When you view a Latin text, the translations, analysis, etc. that are associated with it appear in the right sidebar. If you view a translation or another piece of associated content, it appears side by side with the original text for comparison.

If I keep up this work, I’d like to develop a specialized way of categorizing texts. Right now, free tagging seems to be the best option since a hierarchy gets quite unwieldy when you have so many contingents (What is it? Which book is it in? Which edition of the book? Where is it in the book? etc.).

Let’s say I have a file on which I want to execute a certain instruction (e.g., “open with whatever program”).

I (and I believe most people) prefer to accomplish things in this order: Go to the file; then open it. It is also possible to run the program and then instruct the program to open the file, but I almost never do this.

Now, there are basically two interfaces that I use and that are really available: the command line and the graphical file browser.

The command line has some big advantages in terms of finely tuned instructions. If you were to use the script “engliSH” that I wrote–well, if I’d continued work on it, anyway–then it would be even more natural.¹

The graphical file browser has a big advantage in terms of selecting which files will be the object of the commands.

Think about it in terms of explaining to another person what you want to happen. To describe what needs to be done, you want to use language. To describe the location of something, however, it is often easier to gesture or even make a little drawing.

So, the ideal file manager, in my opinion, would be graphical with a command line on the bottom. Without clicking anything, typing would allow you to enter commands (e.g., a bash shell). Clicking would let you change directories and select files, etc. Hitting enter would then execute the commands you entered on the selected files. It would combine “showing” and “telling” using the strong points of each.

Konqueror can actually be made to operate pretty closely to this, but there are extra clicks involved.

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1 english was a “natural language” shell. Basically, it’s a python script that translates fairly natural language into bash commands.

An actual engliSH session could look like this:

$ list all files here
[ ... ]
$ now delete them


This code in the engliSH shell ends up getting translated as ls ./* and then rm -f ./*

If I hadn’t quit working on it, my goal was to get to the point of being able to use complex descriptions like “the text document I last edited” or “all the songs that start with the letter ‘a’” . Even getting the pronouns to work was pretty neat.

This site is now the first listed in the Google results for quid est veritas!

The Alpha Release of KDE 4 is out. Now I wish I hadn’t left my computer at Kenrick.

I’m attempting to get GNU Lilypond compiled and working on my computer. Once I do, I will hopefully be able to typeset some chant pieces to post on ipsissima-verba.org. This would provide nice PDF as well as Lilypond markup files of the music for various chants. As an added bonus, I believe Lilypond integrates seamlessly with Rosegarden MIDI software. So, there would be almost no extra work in creating MIDI files of chant pieces as well.

Well, I’ve switched to using Joomla to manage Holy Trinity’s website (not THE Holy Trinity’s website) since Drupal won’t work on GoDaddy.com’s servers–they disable certain MySQL and PHP functions. The website is coming along. Next week, there should be more content and even some photographs and whatnot.

I’ve now gotten the information regarding Holy Trinity’s website. It will eventually be set up at http://www.holytrinitystlouis.com/. I need to meet with the people involved to see how they want it to look and things, but based on what I already know, Drupal should do the job just fine. Actually, a full-blown content-management system is overkill, but they need an easy way to update it, so I figure that I’ll go ahead and use it anyway.

I will be helping to set up a website for a parish here in the Archdiocese, Most Holy Trinity Parish (no link because … you know). They have a good knowledge of how they want it to look and function, and it looks like it will be fairly easy to implement. It would be simple enough to hard-code this one, but I think I’ll end up using Drupal so that it will be easy for them to update.

In the meantime, all my glorious website plans for the STAS Alumni Association (STASAA, I guess) are on the back burner because the board meeting keeps getting delayed. If they ever approve my proposed budget and allocate the respective monies (read: send me a check), I’ll establish that site as well. Then I will truly be the Master of the Web!

I finally took that printer out of my trunk today and got it to work on the first try with CUPS and KDE. I guess printing under GNU/Linux is not hard as long as you get the right printer.

Wicked poppin’ fresh mad props to Dakota for rendering his printer Ad usum meum.

I’m going to overhaul ipsissima-verba.org to run on Drupal. Besides this, I’m going to change the focus from translation (although it will still be possible to translate all texts) to archiving Church texts.

Imagine the Liber Usualis online.

Now imagine a website with the Liber, the Missale, the Bible, etc. online with everything organized and searchable. Now throw in the ability for users to add multiple translations of any text and comment on them.

What would be beyond cool would be a “Liturgy Engine” that could piece together different texts as required. For instance, what if you wanted to display all the parts of the Mass along with the readings and prayers for the day? You could have everything needed to say the Mass of the day on your screen. Then, you could print it out (with translations even) and you’d have an instant one-shot Missal!

So, over Thanksgiving break I plan on getting the mains structure set up and adding a ton of texts. That’s the plan: archive, archive, archive and translate later.

Oh, and did I mention that you would be able to add multimedia files as attachments to texts? So, you could bring up a psalm from Evening Prayer and listen to a sound file of someone chanting it.