December Adventure Day 1

I'm going on a December Adventure!

My plan is to recreate a version of DailyLit for myself. I used it a lot from 2007–2015 or so to read a bunch of books in the public domain via email: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Frankenstein, The Time Machine, some Sherlock Holmes, and others.

These days I'd rather do RSS than email, so I'll do that half of the service. And I'll be making it for just me, so I can ignore so many of the complications the DailyLit team would have had to deal with.

Might I be able to cobble this together very quickly? Yes. But I'm happy to pick something smallish. I'd rather spend December leisurely on polish and quality of life than struggling on something hard.

It occurs to me that finding good places to split a work into chunks is not something smoothly automatable. That is to say: it's Hard.

Today's progress

I have picked a terrible name: metamoRSS.

Thinking about where to get the texts from, I naturally thought of Project Gutenberg, which I've used very happily for similar projects. But since I'm going to be more carefully considering presentation, I wondered if I could source from Standard Ebooks. The answer is yes! They only provide various ebook formats, but what is an ebook but a zipped pile of xml and xhtml?

This is a far as I get today: a regrettable name and a plan to chop up ebooks.