The Nitty Gritty

In case you might be wondering why I've started poking at this in August when the posting will not start until November, this post is about what I have to do to get this set up clean and neat:

Not that I'm complaining as I have no one to blame but myself really, but it's a labor of love for sure and I'm proud of all the work I have and will be putting into it.

I feel it is very likely some of the entries from the original text dissection have gone missing or gotten edited accidentally over the last few years so instead of doing a gruelling cross reference project to get the earlier text all cleaned up I opted to start from fresh text and make sure it's good from the outset.

In order to present this the way I am envisioning I have to:

For the whole text

• Find digital copy of Dracula ( in this case a .lit file from the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center)
• Copy full text into a Word document
• Go through entire book highlighting the date of each new date stamp to determine the chronology of entries
• Differentiate any backdated entries by highlighting in a different colour. Because the backdating is sometimes very close to the regular chronology pay specific attention to make sure no current posts are lost in the shuffle
• Determine how many different narrators are represented in the text and how best to make sure people can easily differentiate them - in this case I've chosen to use icon type header images for the top of each post to represent each narrator - some of these will be reused from previous runs and some of these I'd like to replace

For each month

• Split up document by month (backdated entries to be left in publishing order)
• Go through the month worth of entries to number the entries and determine if there are any days with multiple posts - there are a few sections in which multiple people post multiple entries on the same day - this section is super messy 
• Look for time of day clues in each post and determine what time of day to schedule it
• Check for backdated posts and determine how to space them out between chronological posts - this is another really messy area as there are some sections with a month worth of backdated posts in between just a couple of days of chronological posts

For each individual post

• The formatting is always messed up when I paste from the text into blogger, so copy an individual entry into an HTML stripping page (n this case http://www.striphtml.com/ )
  -I may have found an easier way to do this part but I'm still looking into that-
• Copy that result into a notepad file
• Add line breaks back in by comparing to original text
• Copy properly formatted post into a new post on Blogger
• Tag, schedule, and add any icon images/pictures
• Publish

The earlier months are fairly straightforward and well spaced but as you start getting toward September and October in the book chronology all bets are off, so starting early is a must. Since I've started from scratch with a new copy of the text any work I've done on the previous text is basically lost except in theoretical application.