Coding and other skills Archives - Page 2 of 2

Coding for publishers: taster course

Written by Jess Balance on October 30, 2016. Posted in Blog, Coding and other skills, Tech.

SYP member Jessica Ballance combines her work as a bookseller and manager of Daunt Books in North London with the role of associate editor at Dodo Ink, an independent publisher of daring and diverse literary fiction. In September she attended the first Coding for publishers: taster course – here is her review.

For a long time now, I have wanted to code. Like, seriously code. Yet I’ve been continually procrastinating or chickening out or never “finding the time”, as though time were that bit of loose change you find in the pocket of your winter coat when you dust it off again in mid-October. I am drawn to languages you never have to actually speak, and the structural logic minus the performance anxiety of actually speaking it are reasons why I studied Latin into University. Zero performance anxiety.

I have been wanting to attend classes, learn the whims of the different languages, manipulate data and write my own code and programmes and do all sorts of clever things that would make me a more flexible and diverse publisher, not to mention a better human. I looked around, admittedly exhaustively, and spoke to a few friends and friends of friends, and a quick bash of key terms into a search found a few groups on MeetUp, WomenWhoCode for example. I cannot big this group up enough – they host events in association and in the offices of Twitter, ASOS, Sky etc. and have built a community of such strength that their events book up ridiculously quickly and there are sizeable waiting lists of hopeful would-be attendees hoping that some early bird drops out last minute. But many of these women work in tech industries or use programmer languages and deal with data and other such analytics-y things (can you tell I don’t yet?) and glancing over the summaries for each event, as it pings into my inbox (you can opt in for email updates, don’t cha know), there is often a scary amount of jargon for my layman brain to handle.

I am probably hooked up and plugged in to the internet for more hours in a day than I would care to mention, lest any prospective employers are reading this, and through my work with independent publisher, DodoInk, I have had the privilege of working with the wonderfully savvy people at PigeonHole. I read the posts from FutureBook as they land in my inbox and my mind expands and broadens as I take in all the innovative and creative ways people are redefining what it means to be a publisher and how we share, access, and experience books. But like a puckered old balloon, after the excitable expansion, an inevitable deflation ultimately sets in.

If any of you reading this are getting sick of my overuse of the past pluperfect: NO LONGER. Emma Barnes has supplied me with the training wheels to make coding far less intimidating. In her intensive workshop we spent the afternoon getting to grips with four basic (ish) programming languages: HTML, CSS, Java and finally, and youngest of all, Ruby. The way Barnes evangelises about Ruby I think this may be her favourite of the bunch. Just a hunch.

I learnt the jist of when and where to use the different languages, and what they were responsible for in terms in the make-up of a finished, functioning, and hopefully stylish, webpage.

HTML, or Hyper Text Markup Language if we’re being formal, is basically your bread and butter. From my limited understanding it seems to be the main structural element of the four, expressing the information you want on your page — and what’s a webpage with no information? Pretty useless, that’s what.
Probably among the most fun and easiest to play around with was CSS which essentially controls the look of your page allowing you to customise and make it feel even more like your own. Tinkering with this you can alter the font, font colour and size, background colours, etc. Once you find a Hex code database your palette becomes pretty endless.
Java script seems like the most complex of the bunch, and also the most dynamic, enabling your static pages to come to life with smoothly collapsing dropdown information and far more interactive movement elements. Java script also executes within the page as opposed to sending out a request.
Finally: Ruby. To quote Barnes, Ruby is “like poetry”, beautiful and elegant and spare and an extremely coder-friendly language. It also allows you to dynamically find the information you want by utilising a wealth of open-source data resources such as APIs (or Application Programming Interfaces).

As we progressed we applied each stage of our new-found knowledge to build a functioning website, that would be able to mine GoogleBooks’ API data to create our own user-friendly search engine (not too dissimilar from Barnes’ own Bibliocloud). The project based ‘learning by doing’ suited me down to the ground and I didn’t quite realise how quickly I was accruing my new skills — though, don’t get me wrong, I still have a ways to go!

Barnes was backed by an immensely helpful team who were on hand to answer any question, no matter how silly, and help us spot the seemingly indiscoverable errors in our script within seconds of glancing at our screen. They are an impressive bunch, and hugely supportive. In fact, the whole day lacked the often parodied frustration of rage-bashed keyboards and technological tantrums, and was buoyed along by Barnes’ clear enthusiasm and passion for her work, finding joy in the possibilities that code offers, and giving us a glimpse of her curiosity-driven mind.

Barnes eyes would flit over passages of code that were, to me, largely unintelligible and exclaim: ‘oh now THAT’S cool’, or ‘Hmm, THAT’S interesting! I wonder what else I could make that do’. At the end of the day, thanks to Emma Barnes and her team, BookMachine, and FaberAcademy, I think we all left wondering a similar thing: That was cool. Now, I wonder what else I can do…

If you would like to take part in the next Coding for publishers course, sign up to the BookMachine mailing list and we will let you know when tickets are available.

What’s your flavour?: Selecting the right XML for your content

Written by Emily Gibson and Nic Gibson on June 7, 2016. Posted in Articles, Blog, Coding and other skills, Digital, Ebook and digital production, How-To, Production, Tech. 1 Comment

This is a guest post from Emily Gibson and Nic Gibson. They are both directors of Corbas Consulting Ltd and each have over 20 years’ publishing experience, mostly in editorial, print and digital production.

The other day we were contacted by a client who was really excited about the new digital publishing process they were putting into place, and they wanted some help getting things right. They had bought a database and needed to get their Word documents into the XML language that their database needed. However, the ‘flavour’ of XML that they had chosen wasn’t going to support the content that they were producing. That means that they aren’t going to get the best results and full value from their workflow system.

You see, publishing with XML is not just a matter of deciding to ‘have an XML workflow’. (For a basic description for editors, see, for example, this one in The Chicago Manual of Style.) There are many different ‘flavours’ of XML and you need to pick the one that fits your needs. These needs are defined by the type of content you are publishing and your workflow.

A well styled Word document, for example, can be transformed into a decent XML file. Once you have an XML file, you could simply apply scripts to it to create your output (PDF, HTML for your website, EPUB) – if you have a Word document for your novel, for example, that had Word Styles consistently applied, you can simply run a program to get whatever output you need.

On the other hand, if you have a bunch of journal articles, you could save the files into an XML-aware database and apply those scripts to all your content at once to produce a collection. Whichever system you choose is partly driven by the degree of automation that fits your publishing needs. If you are publishing fifteen monographs a year, there’s not a lot of benefit to an all-singing and all-dancing XML database. If you are publishing several hundred articles a year then there are some big benefits.

The first step is to decide how you are going to go from manuscript to XML and then you need to decide what systems you are going to use to manipulate and transform it.

You need to think about both the structure and the content of your manuscripts when you decide on which flavour of XML you are going to choose. The different flavours of XML are very different in their structure and their expressiveness. The only thing you can be fairly sure of is that there is already one which will meet most of your needs (you don’t need to write it from scratch).

There are different tag sets (the set of elements in an XML language, a.k.a. what’s inside the pointy brackets) that suit different kinds of content, and there are different tools to suit them, too. In the same way that ice cream and sausages are both delicious, but you wouldn’t want them together, not every flavour of XML goes with every kind of content.

Match the content you publish with the appropriate XML language. For example:

Simple Narrative

Pedagogical

DITA

Legal

Encyclopedic

DITA

Journals

NLM JATS

If your content doesn’t have specialised semantics (e.g. legal, programming), the XML variant of HTML5, XHTML (as used in EPUB) is perfectly suitable for a lot of narrative (e.g. novels) and monograph material for EPUB, print and web outputs. The XML variant of HTML5 has the advantage of a smaller, simpler tag set, which makes it easier to work with for simpler content.

XML can help publishers tackle managerial as well as technical challenges. It provides ways to manage the workflow, the interaction between content and people, and the publishing processes, as well as the documents themselves. The features of XML ensure that information and its structure can be controlled and managed.

It can be a complex topic, but many publishing professionals find that knowing about XML – even if they don’t use it every day – is immensely useful. There are a number of places that you can learn about XML, but the XML Summer School, held each year in September, is the best and most comprehensive. It presents a range of XML techniques and applications in workflow, change management, QA, linked data, and document structure control to help publishers manage their content effectively.

The Hands-on Digital Publishing course provides hands-on material and helpful contacts in the world of publishing and XML. This course is chaired by Peter Flynn and taught by Nic Gibson, Norm Walsh, Tomos Hillman, and Tony Graham.

For more information, see: http://xmlsummerschool.com/curriculum-2016/xml-in-publishing-2016/

Get with the program: Why and how to start coding

Written by Anna Faherty on May 5, 2016. Posted in Articles, Blog, Careers, Coding and other skills, Digital, How-To, Tech, Trends. 2 Comments

You work in publishing, right? You think you’re creative? What do you spend most of your time at work doing? If you’re in a low-level position, Snowbooks and Bibliocloud founder Emma Barnes suggests your answer is likely to comprise a list of decidedly uncreative tasks.

In a witty, insightful and inspiring talk at the Galley Club this week, Barnes bemoaned the publishing industry habit of hiring bright, creative people and then getting them to do dull and repetitive administrative jobs. As she wrote in the Bookseller last year, if you joined publishing because you wanted to create wonderful books, you’re left wondering “why copying and pasting between Excel, Word and InDesign feature so heavily in this ostensibly creative process”. But Barnes isn’t just a bemoaner, she’s a problem solver. Her solution to this problem? Get coding. Because if you can code, you can automate some of these dull jobs and free up time to do the fun – and important – creative things publishers should be doing.

For many publishers, the word “coding” is almost as terrifying as “maths”. Certainly, when I used to introduce a 2-hour MA Publishing session on coding at Kingston University, the response was usually a mixture of fear, disinterest and irritation that I was forcing students to spend time doing such a dull and difficult thing. If these are your natural responses, try replacing “coding” in your head with words like “carpentry” or “poetry”. Writing code, says Barnes, is “the modern equivalent of being a carpenter”. It’s an opportunity not just to come up with ideas, or to shape them (as editors do with authors’ work), but to make ideas happen yourself.

Coding can definitely be challenging (Barnes uses the phrase “mind-bendingly awful”), but you don’t need to be a maths geek to be good at it. Barnes has publicly admitted to being “useless” at arithmetic. Instead, she brings a love of patterns, words, symmetry and brevity to the activity. “Writing code trips many of the pleasure centres in my brain,” she says. “And I love feeling that I’m doing something meaningful, creating something out of nothing. Plus, the inherent difficulty of writing good code is a source of huge pride”. My former students, when they made things appear on screen in a browser in a matter of minutes, often shared this pride – evidence that if you can get over the fear or disinterest factor, this undeniably creative pursuit can be extremely satisfying. What’s more, publishers’ natural tendency to grammatical “correctness” makes them excellent coders.

Our love of pedantry feels like a perfect match for a pursuit based on strict rules and zero tolerance for inaccuracy. And our love of words reinforces the idea that publishers are natural coders. As Barnes points out, code is written, just like poetry and books are. Code is even created in narrative arcs, which Barnes likens to “reading the best novel ever” if done well. If you appreciate “the careful crafting of a narrative flow, or the finely-edited end-result of a piece of prose, honed and whittled and buffed to perfection,” says Barnes on Digital Book World, then you’ll appreciate good coding too.

For me, Barnes’s almost evangelical talk of creating things and sending them out into the world was enough to get me thinking I should sharpen up my own coding skills. But the value of coding isn’t just this personal satisfaction. If you can code, you can start to automate those decidedly uncreative tasks that fill up your day. And then you can find time to get down to the collaborative, creative business of publishing. What more encouragement do you need? If that’s truly not enough, then the doomsday scenario suggests school-leavers in a decade or so will all be able to code and your old-fashioned spreadsheet skills will look positively archaic on your CV.

So, how to get coding? Here are some of the ways Barnes’ suggests you “start to dabble with code”:

Spend just 15 minutes on Try Ruby – a quick and basic online programming tutorial.
Try Scratch – a free coding app, designed for kids, that helps you think systematically and build simple games, animations and interactive stories.
Read Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial – Barnes claims that if you work through it for half an hour every day for three months, you’ll have built Twitter.
Sign up to a Codeacademy or Code School course – free online courses on programming languages. Barnes recommends learning Ruby.
Join a coding community like Rails Girls or Code Bar – offering help, advice and events (including free workshops). Barnes and the Bibliocloud team volunteer at Rails Girls.

As a result of attending Barnes’s Galley Club talk, I’ve applied to participate in the free Rails Girls London workshop in June. If I get accepted, I’m expecting a day packed with creativity, challenge, making and – I hope – a sense of pride and achievement. Oh, and a newly enhanced CV too. See you there?

Anna Faherty is a writer, publisher and teacher. She collaborates with global publishers and museums on digital, print, exhibition and training projects and has taught on publishing programmes at Kingston University, Oxford Brookes University and University College London. Anna blogs at http://strategiccontent.co.uk/blog and tweets as @mafunyane.

The code less travelled: Why I became a Rails Girl for the day and why we should all care more about coding

Written by Abbie Headon on December 20, 2015. Posted in Articles, Blog, Coding and other skills, Digital, Events, Tech.

Recently, I seem to have encountered coding at every turn. It all started with an article by Jasmin Kirkbride here on BookMachine, back in April. Today’s children are the true digital natives among us, and now that computing – actual coding, not just learning how to use a computer – has been introduced to England’s National Curriculum it seems likely that when they reach the workforce they’ll be bringing a confident knowledge of coding with them. Now not all of us are going to become code whizz-kids ourselves, but Jasmin is one among many who argue that if we don’t at least learn the basic principles of what goes on under a computer’s bonnet*, we risk becoming increasingly out of touch with our future colleagues.

Coder Generation: Building digital skills doesn’t have to be scary

Written by Jasmin Kirkbride on April 5, 2015. Posted in Blog, Coding and other skills, Digital, Tech, Views. 2 Comments

The digital revolution might seem like a challenge to us now, but there’s a whole new generation of digital natives that will be coming into the jobs market over the next decade, for whom coding, apps and mobile technology are as natural as breathing.

Five things they know about XML that you don’t

Written by Emily Gibson on March 17, 2015. Posted in Articles, Blog, Coding and other skills, Editorial, How-To, Production, Tech. 1 Comment

This is a guest post from Emily and Nic Gibson. They are both directors of Corbas Consulting Ltd and each have over 15 years’ publishing experience, mostly in editorial, print and digital production.

Knowledge is everything they say. To help you get ahead, here are the five things they know about XML that you don’t.

1. You are using XML every day

How to create a catalogue automatically using ONIX and InDesign

Written by Emma Barnes on February 25, 2015. Posted in Coding and other skills, Editorial, How-To, Production, Tech, Workflow Tools. 2 Comments

This is a guest post from Emma Barnes. Emma is co-founder of General Products, and indie publisher Snowbooks. General Products is the company behind FutureBook-award-winning Bibliocloud, the web-based all-in-one publishing management system.

Did you go into publishing so that you could spend your days copying and pasting ever-changing metadata from spreadsheets, emails and databases into InDesign? You did? Great. No need to read on.

A publisher’s guide to APIs

Written by Emma Barnes on January 28, 2015. Posted in Articles, Coding and other skills, Digital, How-To, Tech. 4 Comments

API is one of those acronyms you hear bandied about. “APIs”, people say, “are vital. Vital!” But if, as you fervently nod in agreement, you’re thinking of another acronym — “WTF?” — then this article is for you.

A non-technical, beginners’ guide to ONIX for Books

Written by Emma Barnes on January 22, 2015. Posted in Articles, Coding and other skills, Digital, How-To, Operations, Production, Tech. 1 Comment

This is a guest post from Emma Barnes and Rob Jones. Emma and Rob are co-founders of General Products Ltd, and indie publisher Snowbooks. General Products is the company behind FutureBook-award-winning Bibliocloud, the web-based all-in-one publishing management system. Here is an edited extract from The Bibliocloud Book: read more at http://bibliodocs.com/manual

About XML

XML is one of those boring ideas that can make business run more smoothly, like ISBN numbers or barcodes. Really it’s just some general rules for how to write down information so that computers as well as people can read it – mainly computers, though. It’s not even a full set of rules; it’s just enough to help people make a start on designing their own formats for sharing information.

XML basics … and I do mean basics!

Written by Alex Painter on May 15, 2013. Posted in Articles, Coding and other skills, How-To, Tech. 5 Comments

This is a very basic introduction to XML (extensible markup language). If you think that XML is exclusively for techie people or you don’t really know what it is at all, this post is for you.

6 Questions for Sophie Goldsworthy, Project Director, Oxford Scholarly Editions [INTERVIEW]

Written by Sophie O’Rourke on September 14, 2012. Posted in Coding and other skills, Interviews, Products, Tech.

Five years ago Oxford University Press initiated a project to transform the way old texts could be accessed, read and re-purposed online. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online finally launched last week and I caught up with the Project Director Sophie Goldsworthy.

How to get in to the mobile app game without losing your shirt

Written by Andrew Roberts on August 3, 2011. Posted in Articles, Coding and other skills, How-To, Products, Tech. 1 Comment

Andy Roberts

Ustwo’s Nursery Rhymes iPad app by most measures is a success. An innovative interactive ebook, by mid-June after less than four months it had shifted over 37,000 copies, was subject to rave reviews and benefited from being promoted several times by Apple itself. Most developers would be extremely pleased. The only downside: £60,000 spent, £24,000 in income; it is still a long way off from breaking even.

There’s little doubt that their app will eventually make a decent profit. Ustwo was remaining fairly philosophical about the situation: “Innovate now, don’t think this is about making money now. It’s about pushing the medium forward. Have a lot of fun and you’ll benefit in the future.” A view I highly applaud, but a view which many publishers will understandably be weary of. There’s no shortage of avenues where money can be spent with no return! But mobile apps need not be one of them.

I’ve worked on a successful series of apps for an educational publisher. Below are my views about how publishers can get into the right frame of mind to approach the app market and avoid common pitfalls.

Apps for Digital Publishing: There are only 5 rules (Part 2)

Written by Dean Johnson (Brandwidth) on July 13, 2011. Posted in Articles, Coding and other skills, How-To, Products, Tech.

This is Part Two of Dean Johnson’s look at how to survive in the cut-throat business of app development. Read Part One here.

RULE THREE: Design and build a great app not a good one

Create an app that does the original (or new) content justice. If you don’t, you will risk Apple rejecting
your title, or worse, the consumer voting with their wallet, star-rating and review.

Apps for Digital Publishing: There are only 5 rules (Part 1)

Written by Dean Johnson (Brandwidth) on July 11, 2011. Posted in Articles, Coding and other skills, How-To, Products, Tech.

Dean Johnson

The app business can be as cut-throat as any other. When Brandwidth launched our first Guinness World Records app in April 2010, we were accused of jumping on the bandwagon as many other developers had either been creating apps for the iPhone or publicly immersed in the publishing world for years.

Category: Coding and other skills

Coding for publishers: taster course