From the beginning (back at the beginning of this century) my interest in making content for the Web has run to creating something book-like, rather than a blog or some other form.
My first effort along these lines was Reason to Rock, which I’ve been pretty happy with. This was when I created a Java app called PSTextMerge, which was driven by text-delimited files in order to generate the pages and structure for the resulting website.
PSTextMerge functionality then became part of Notenik, and I used that app to create my next web book, Big Ideas in Software Development.
And then, of course, there’s the Notenik Knowledge Base, which is also in a book-like form.
And while Notenik has been a very useful tool for all of this, these earlier efforts generally required the creation and editing of special merge templates and script files, which were very powerful, but also a little complicated.
For my latest web book, though, I decided to try to generate the entire site using only Notenik code, without need for any auxiliary files for formatting and scripting.
So many of the recent changes to Notenik have been focused on enhancing the Export as Web Book functionality to allow all the important niceties to be produced straight out of Notenik, without need for any merge templates or script files.
And while there’s probably more that could be done here, I’m now at a point where I’m pretty satisfied with everything.
If you’d like to take a look at the resulting web book (or perhaps web-based book, to use the terminology preferred by Matthew Butterick), you can find it at AboutHumans.net. And if you’d like to view or even download the entire Notenik project, you can find that on GitHub.
I have to say that I think the current version of Notenik is a pretty awesome tool for writing, organizing and publishing a web book. Notenik supports all of the following:
- Creation and editing of content
- Organizing and reorganizing content
- Sophisticated and flexible numbering of sections, chapters and so on
- Generation of traditional book elements, such as an index and a bibliography
- Generation of typical website navigation, including a search page
- Internal presentation of the entire collection/book in something very like the finished form
- Complete generation of HTML as part of an easy export function
Don’t know if anyone else will be inspired to use Notenik in this way, but right now I’m pretty pleased with it!