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New Catalog Generator, and Reuploading Anthem

by NJB // // Broomfield, CO

© 2023 Nantucket E-Books LLC

CC-BY-SA 4.0

Please check out the new and improved catalog page for Nantucket E-Books. This is an update that I’ve been looking forward to: a better way of generating the online catalog.

The catalog page displays all the titles available on Nantucket E-Books, with cover art, descriptions, age-appropriateness, and whether or not an audiobook is included. Originally, the catalog was built by pulling metadata from the HTML files for each e-book. However, parsing HTML is difficult, so for a while I was updating the catalog file manually.

Obviously, neither solution was ideal. What I wanted to do was build the catalog by parsing the Shanty files for each e-book. In the Shanty files, all the metadata is nicely labeled and organized at the start of the file. If I could bundle the Shanty file with each e-book, generating the catalog would be a snap.

Getting to that point, though, was another matter. For the sake of consistency, I had to update all the e-books on the site, 35 in total, to the latest version, 4.0.1. In many cases, new Shanty files had to be prepared to bundle with the e-books. Now that it’s done, I am happy with the results. Adding new books to the site is as easy as a single command in the terminal.

My next goal has two parts: make it easier to update the HTML file for individual books, and to make it easier to update the software and stylesheets for all e-books.

Vector-art recreation of the cover to the first edition, with the words ANTHEM, a novel by AYN RAND, author of WE THE LIVING, on a sepia-colored background.

I have also re-uploaded Anthem, the classic dystopian novel. I put together this vector-art recreation of the first-edition cover, the SVG file is less than one kilobyte.

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