Dublin Library

The Publishing Project

Slowdown and New Projects

  • 2 min. read

 

I started a contract in early June that has swallowed all my time and as a result there have been fewer blogs and, I hate to admit it, with a lower quality than I would like. I also have a few projects that I've been working on for a while and that I want to finally finish and put to rest. These projects (and some of the questions they seek to answer) are:

  1. Long form publishing using Service Workers: An exploration of how far we can push the web as a publishing medium.

    • What can we do beyond offline?
    • Is it possible to have a fully offline reading experience after first download?
    • How have reader expectations changed?
    • Do all paradigms for copy protection and owner rights apply?
    • How do existing and upcoming technologies benefit online publishing?
    • Is it now possible to create multiple content delivery vehicles from the same source?
    • Is it useful to build cross platform versions of our publications? If so what tool should we use?

  2. A visual editor for long form content based on my Athena set of web components and the Polymer editor

    • Is the editor ready for primetime? It doesn't seem to be a high priority for people working on development
    • Since the client is written using Atom Shell, can we do the same thing for the resulting content?

  3. A more conceptual piece to follow up on What kind of web do we want and expands on some of the points I tried to make there.

  4. Are we spoiled for choice? There's so many choices at all levels of the development stack (both back and front end) that it's scary for someone coming in to the field. I'll present my own opinionated choices and sample scripts using them.

  5. I got dinged on accessibility big time. More research, experimentation and development, particularly in my Polymer apps

  6. Create a set of paged media CSS to match layouts in Kinfolk and Wired

  7. Polymer based theme for Wordpress blog

  8. Get back to my book proposal on web components. Run it by reviewers and see if Pragmatic will accept it or not

I will not start any new project until some of these see the light of day. I want to say most of them but I know that it won't be possible. Some of these depend on other people and I don't want to rely on them as the dependencies are low priority for them.

I expect these projects to take me the rest of the year, if not longer. I will post as often as I can with updates and the answers to some of the questions posed and others generated along the way, just not twice a week anymore.

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