Twitter Updates for 2009-09-30
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
- RT @Dropbox: OMG!!! THE DROPBOX IPHONE APP IS OUT!!! <3<3 http://blog.getdropbox.com #
- Does anyone have a gwave invite yet? I would love to try it out. #
Archive for September, 2009
Twitter Updates for 2009-09-23
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
- Push gmail is cool'n'all, but i'm not that fast. What I really want is notifications from the gmail web app. #
Twitter Updates for 2009-09-10
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
- Although it feels very "un-apple" to me, the applications organizer in iTunes 9 is the most exciting thing I saw today. #
Database publishing – from choosing a database solution to InDesign ready XML file.
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
My 9-5 is working in house as the web developer for a small publishing company in California. One of our current projects is a book titled “The Blue Pages: A Directory of Companies Rated by their Politics and Practices. 2nd Edition.” Publishing this November by PoliPointPress.
After the first edition was published in 2006, the database which held all of the research information from the book was lost. We had a Word doc with the content of the book but that was all. We needed a database to store the new research information for the second edition. I considered several solutions ranging from using Google Spreadsheets to creating a custom, remotely hosted, database using Filemaker. In the end I chose a web application called Dabble DB. Dabble’s feature set fit our project needs for several reasons but the main attraction was that Dabble allows exports of your database in a variety of formats, including RSS.
My original idea was to open the RSS feeds in a browser, “view source”, copy and paste the XML into a text editor and scrape off the extra code, then use the simplified XML that was left and import that into InDesign. That idea didn’t end up working, mostly because the RSS XML had so much extra code in it that stripping out the extra code would have been too complicated and was more than a series of “Find and Replace” commands could handle. However, Dabble DB also provides comma separated value (CSV) exports. So I took those CSV files and ran them through an XML converter that I found on the web here. Once the CSV data was converted to XML I copied the code and pasted it into a new XML file with Coda (my web development software). Which left me with an XML file that I could use to import into InDesign.
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