I’m trying to figure out how to handle the Letters to Esther project, which has been dead in the water for several months. I just can’t get motivated to work on it, when I don’t know exactly where it’s headed. I’ve only transcribed a small fraction of the letters, but already it’s too unwieldy for a blog-type format. I knew that was only a temporary solution, but I was unprepared for how quickly it got out of hand. So, I’m trying to figure out what to do with it. What I want to do is transcribe each letter, then add it to a database, along with accompanying scans of the letter and envelope. Yes, I could do it in HTML, but it would be god-awfully tedious to code that many pages (I haven’t counted them, but there are several hundred letters). Plus, I’d like it to be easily searchable and sortable, which is beyond my coding abilities. So, third party software seems like the best bet.
My web host provides a slew of free content management systems (Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, PHP-Nuke, etc.), but are any of them suitable? I need to sit down and do some research, I guess, but I’m really not looking forward to it. I suppose I could just install and test each of them one-by-one, then, if the program doesn’t meet my needs, delete the directory when I’m finished playing around. That, too, sounds like a lot of work.
Blah. I have a sneaking suspicion that any of them will work, and that they’re all pretty likely to be similar in functionality. From the descriptions on their websites, I sure as heck can’t tell why any one of them would be more appropriate to my needs than the next.
Anyway, I guess my main point is that I haven’t forgotten about Letters to Esther. I just haven’t had the time or the motivation necessary to do anything with it lately. I’ve been thinking about it, though. Hopefully, that thinking will soon turn into something more concrete. Or, um, virtual.
red paper boat 