Idiot meets web fonts

A minor change to my History of Barcelona mini-site, designed to make it even less accessible to passers-by.

Let’s see what the natives make of this.

I don’t think anyone much uses it – the only past people really care about, and we’re talking a small minority of nutters, is restarting the Civil War – but ephemeral factoids presented in ephemeral form have served to amuse and educate me.

In the beginning to get some kind of critical mass I put together a script to automate and process OCR of scans of the 1848 Libro Verde kindly donated by JD (Google Books was still pretty crap at that stage), and I hacked together a WordPress theme to present a daily carousel of posts with accompanying RSS feed.

Since then I’ve added roughly a post a day manually, derived from bogside reading which tends towards the anecdotal, but apart from that I’ve generally left well alone – image selection, for example, is automated via a rather silly scrape & select algorithm which I hope never escapes into the wider world, and tagging is semi-automated.

It would be nice if someone (a bookshop? La Vanguardia? Fèlix Millet?) came along and paid slightly more than Google for ads or in sponsorship, but it’s not the kind of thing I’m inclined to chase.

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Comments

  1. You need a 19th century-looking font and Victorian ads from Google and then you’ll have the front page of the Times before it started going downhill.

  2. I may not be the first to ask, I’m nevertheless intrigued. How many people are you, Trebots? Or alternatively, do you ever sleep?

  3. Ssshhh, or the voices in my head may form a comité and go revolutionary on me.

    Not (yet) having children may help.

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