About This Site
Maximum results with minimum effort. My goal here is to create a website which provides maximum results for Latin students with minimum effort on my part. I am no longer teaching Latin at my school, but I often receive requests from students for easy-to-read materials. I hope this site will meet that ongoing need!
Step-by-step. Here's how I create a new story post, step by step:
- Figure out what story to include. This is absolutely the most fun part... there are so many incredible Bible stories! My target is to around 300-400 words or so.
- Get the Latin text from Unbound Bible. Tag the paragraphs that are direct speech. Tag the individual verbs (since the speech tags are all paragraphs, there is no overlap problem when I tag the verbs). This is the segmented version!
- Use a find-and-replace to replace the p speech tags with span tags, and replace all the other p tags and br tags with white space. Reinsert the verse numbers, using a hard-return for each new verse. This is the Bible version! (and now I can strip the instrusive verse numbers from the segmented version)
- Write the Latin commentary, using the Bible version as a prompt; delete any verse numbers that have no commentary.
- Get the English translation (Douay-Rheims) from Unbound Bible.
- Publish the 4 different pieces as webpages at this website, and update the Stories Index.
Style sheets. Style sheets are being used at this website to let users choose different ways of viewing the Latin texts. To do this, I used a genius javascript made available at A List Apart in order to create alternate stylesheets. This allows website users to choose how the direct quotations in the text are displayed, and also how the verbs are displayed, based on the stylesheet being used when the page is displayed.