I know, I'm a nerd. But I do enjoy geeking out on a Sunday. Imagine me surrounded late at night by empties of Mountain Dew, novelty hat perched atop my head, servers whirring, illuminated only by the glow of the screen. None of that is, of course, the case. However, I have found enough geek in me to knock together a bit of handy XSL tonight.
I'm knee-deep in creating ePub versions of all our books. ePub books live or die by their metadata - the stuff that describes what's in 'em. I really don't want to enter all that bibliographic metadata manually when it's all safely stored already in my Onix data. So here's a video to show how I get it out of the Onix format and into Adobe's XMP format. It's very quick and it's very accurate - and 'quick' and 'accurate' are things what I like.
I suppose I'd better put the video below the cut to be sensitive to those Snowblog readers who really couldn't care less about code. Think of it this way, though - this'll save me about a day's work, not to mention the embarrassment and lost sales due to the inaccuracy that my cack-handed manual data entry would inevitably lead to. More time to do fun things! Like, er, my bookkeeping course which I'm really enjoying and will tell you about later. Anyway. Videos first.
Emma
The SnowBlog is one of the oldest publishing blogs, started in 2003, and it's been through various content management systems over the years. A 2005 techno-blunder meant we lost the early years, but the archives you're reading now go all the way back to 2005.
Many of the older posts in our blog archive suffer from link rot. Apologies if you see missing links and images: let us know if you'd like us to find any in particular.
I know, I'm a nerd. But I do enjoy geeking out on a Sunday. Imagine me surrounded late at night by empties of Mountain Dew, novelty hat perched atop my head, servers whirring, illuminated only by the glow of the screen. None of that is, of course, the case. However, I have found enough geek in me to knock together a bit of handy XSL tonight.
I'm knee-deep in creating ePub versions of all our books. ePub books live or die by their metadata - the stuff that describes what's in 'em. I really don't want to enter all that bibliographic metadata manually when it's all safely stored already in my Onix data. So here's a video to show how I get it out of the Onix format and into Adobe's XMP format. It's very quick and it's very accurate - and 'quick' and 'accurate' are things what I like.
I suppose I'd better put the video below the cut to be sensitive to those Snowblog readers who really couldn't care less about code. Think of it this way, though - this'll save me about a day's work, not to mention the embarrassment and lost sales due to the inaccuracy that my cack-handed manual data entry would inevitably lead to. More time to do fun things! Like, er, my bookkeeping course which I'm really enjoying and will tell you about later. Anyway. Videos first.