The generous ethos is admirable. Indeed, whereas the spotlight has recently been shone on software developers to become more aware of certain ethical issues, along with pressure to change their practices, there is in fact much to be learnt from that community. I have tried to intimate this in Open Sources: A Higher Consciousness in Software Development, a paper I gave at an unusual conference on the theme of wisdom.

As a developer myself, I am largely self-taught since the 1980s. It may explain why, when solving programming problems, I can be somewhat unconventional and occasionally original.

Open Source contributions

I’m not a prolific or fluent coder, but have contributed to a few open source projects and am currently working on two.

• MakeStaticSite, a static site generator and deployer, is a Bash script that I already use to generate static versions of locally-developed WordPress sites (like this one and research.siga.la). It is release as free/open source software under AGPL v.3 and is available for download.
• WP Offline Search is a further refinement of my fork of WP Static Search by Gergely Szerovay, who developed a WordPress plugin based on Lunr.js. As I’ve not received any response to my pull requests and have reworked quite a lot of the code, I changed the name and intend to set up a new repository.
• epubcheck-web (contributor) – enabling standards-based checking of ePub documents to help self-publishing, motivated by my experiences of self-publishing a Kindle book (see especially the EPUB conversion report slides).

I hope to share the Sigala code likewise, once it has reached a certain level of maturity.

For my work using other people’s software, take a look at the portfolio.

Legacy software, but enduring paradigms

At the turn of the millennium, there was no universal means for authors to edit and maintain their content through their web browser. The technical solutions that existed tended to work only on specific platforms, carried a fee, or else require a Java plugin.

In response, I devised one, NetWedit, possibly the world’s first cross-platform JavaScript-based solution, released under GNU LGPL, in the days when I still thought that the first ‘L’ stood for ‘library’ rather than ‘lesser’. It was experimental and used a crafty method, but it worked well enough for members of Oxford University’s Theology Faculty to maintain their profiles for a teach and learning resources database.

As browser DOM support improved, I subsequently enhanced the functionality, but kept the same basic user interface, to produce RTWedit, which was incorporated into early versions of WebLearn, Oxford University’s centrally-hosted virtual learning environment.

Standards have moved on and browsers only maintain limited backwards compatibility, so my tools don’t work in a standard desktop today, but the approach of working from first principles is ever-relevant. I’ve recorded some notes in a retrospective piece, Adventures in the Read/Write Web.

Nowadays, we take for granted the fact that we can write content in systems such as WordPress and Drupal using a rich text editor with an experience similar to that in a word processor. Such editors, based on packages such as TinyMCE and CK Editor are still written in JavaScript.

Date: 2019-2020 (staff member); November 2021 (consultant)

Brief: A digital asset management system (ResourceSpace, fully-supported by Montala) was procured for the History of Science Museum, along with other departments in Oxford University’s Gardens, Libraries and Museums (GLAM). The DAMS was used as an intranet, primarily for its object photography. It needed broad stakeholder adoption and to be integrated with the existing collections management system (Axiell EMu).

Roles: As the coordinator of digital projects at HSM, I was involved in the selection of the DAMS and then was responsible for its implementation, including the ingestion of tranches, together with documentation and basic training. For the consultancy I provided further support for this process.

Solution: Considerable preparation was required before we could use the system. I undertook or oversaw a number of stages, including the development of policy comprising a digital preservation policy, retention schedules and data protection. These ran alongside a digital assets audit, metadata specification process (involving all potential stakeholders), system requirements, data export, cleansing, munging and ingestion. As it was messy, I developed a Digital Assets Toolkit, comprising a set of custom scripts for some of the heavy lifting.

URL: https://www.glam.ox.ac.uk/digital-asset-management-system-dams-project

Thursday’s Lotus

Date: 2016

Roles: Fac totum! Content author, book producer and publisher,

Product: Thursday’s Lotus: The Life and Work of Fuengsin Trafford (1936-1995) is a biography of my mother that was twenty years in the making. It involved considerable research, including some fieldwork, in which I devised an image-assisted interview process.

The book was produced in Microsoft Word and self-published using CreateSpace. I strove to produce a polished work, employing editors and an indexer and spent time fine-tuning the layout; perhaps the greatest compliment I have received was from an IT Manager, who asked if I had typeset the work in LaTeX.

Websites: https://fuengsin.org/, https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01LZ82DYY/, https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/thursday-s-lotus

Thursday’s Lotus – ePub version

Date: 2016 – 2017

I followed up the publication of the hard copy with an ePub version, which I published through Kindle and also Kobo. I initially made the conversion manually, exporting the book as filtered HTML from Word and gradually cleaning it up and augmenting it until it was ready to submit as an ePub file.

Once I had some grasp of the process, I worked on a proof of concept of a web-based service that would provide automated assistance for this stepwise refinement, which I provisionally called pen2epub. It includes various types of content validation. Most of the slides below are screenshots from that system

Please click on a thumbnail to access project details and slideshows.

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