14. Putting It All Together ↑

14.7 Write a Web Book

I majored in English in college, and have maintained a lifelong interest in reading and writing, even though I ended up forging a career in software development.

During the 1990's I edited, authored and published a couple of books printed and bound in the traditional fashion. I wrote and formatted these books using Microsoft Word and PageMaker running on my personal Mac.

But when the Web came along, I became fascinated by the new possibilities it offered for many sorts of writing and publishing, but especially for book-length compositions. My first exploration of these possibilities was done with Reason To Rock – which I originally published in 2001 – and I’m still pretty happy with the results. The tools were sort of clumsy at that early stage, but it was great to have a published work that could be updated at any time, with hyperlinks, with multiple navigation paths through the text, and with pages that could be indexed by search engines.

I started out using Textile as a lightweight markup language, and writing with BBEdit. I was learning Java around the same time, and wrote some software that would pull data from an Excel spreadsheet, or a tab-delimited file (TDF), and then fill in some HTML templates using the columns and rows of the spreadsheet. And all of that worked pretty well.

I kept working on my Web publishing software, written in Java, and used it again when I published The Big Ideas in Software Development in 2016. My tools had advanced in the intervening years, and I now had a version of Notenik written in Java.

But then the Java language seemed to become less and less of a practical, enjoyable tool for writing desktop apps, so I rewrote all of the code using Swift. And since making the transition, the new Notenik has gradually acquired all of the functionality of the Java app, plus a lot more.

Notenik can be readily used as an everyday note-taker, but in reality much of my motivation to continue with Notenik development has been to build a better and better tool for creating Web books – book-length compositions that provide the rich depth of a traditional book, but also provide hyperlinks, both for navigating within a book as well as to outside reference sources, along with indexing, searching, and alternative navigation paths.

And so the latest Web book I’ve been working on is the Notenik Knowledge Base – a book-length composition about Notenik, built using Notenik with all of its recent enhancements, and readable using Notenik.

The whole thing can be easily published in HTML form, and can be viewed on the Notenik.app website. But if you’d like to see how it’s produced, you can also view all the supporting files on GitHub. And, if you have the Notenik app installed on your Mac, you can read the whole thing within Notenik.

So where should you start if you’d like to produce your own Web book using Notenik?

Here’s a list of some of the key features to explore:

• Consider how you might want to break up your book-length text into sections, chapters, and/or subsections.

• Use the Seq and Level fields to organize your content into a neatly numbered outline.

• Use the Seq + Title option beneath the Sort menu to keep the content sorted using your numbering scheme.

• Use Wiki Style Links to allow your readers to easily navigate from one chunk of content to another, related, page.

• Use the Also Known As field to allow you to easily and naturally refer to related pages via an alternative name for some pages.

• Tailor Collection Settings to Format Display for Streamlined Reading and to not Include explicit Body field label for Note. This will help make for a more natural reading experience within Notenik, and will help you experience your Collection as a linear whole.

• Tailor the Display in order to change the font options used. These same options will be used as defaults if you later Generate a Web Book for your readers.

• Remember that you can look beneath the Collection menu to Renumber Seq based on Level in order to straighten out your Seq numbering from time to time.

• You can also look beneath the Collection menu to Replace Tags based on Seq and Level. This will produce special Tags that allow you to navigate through your content while opening and closing sections of your book using disclosure triangles.

• You can also Generate a Collection Table of Contents that allows readers to navigate easily through your content.

• You can also use the Index field to provide an index for your work, and generate a Collection Index wherever you like within your Collection.

• You can also generate a Tags Outline on any page within your Collection.

• Once you’re ready to publish, you can use the Generate a Web Book command beneath the Collection menu to create folders of HTML and CSS files that will allow your creation to be read within any Web browser.

• For more control over your output, you can add additional Field Labels and Types, design your own custom Merge Templates, and sort and filter your content in endless ways using Script Files.

The evolution of the Web over the past several decades has been a reductive arc in many ways, with personal expression often being reduced to a series of blog posts, or even micro-blog posts. But if you have something more complex to say, intended to be of more enduring interest, then you probably want something more like a book. And Notenik can help you record and organize your book-length content, and then share it on the Web, leveraging all of the advantages that the Web has to offer, when compared to the printed page.