Kudos - this looks very interesting! Plus, I love the Python+DIYish+Open Source combination (Linux user here). I just logged in with username 'ilbuonme'. Could you please give me permission to create a commentary?

I am actually thinking of making use of this in my high school teaching of Latin. The largest class I have, though, is of 16 people. If, say, 8 of them were logging in together (i.e. 16 people from 8 different computers), would your servers stand it?

All best,
Paolo
 
 

Gesendet: Montag, 03. März 2014 um 14:03 Uhr
Von: "Scot Mcphee" <[log in to unmask]>
An: [log in to unmask]
Betreff: [DIGITALCLASSICIST] new digital classics resource - in 'alpha' test - decommentariis.net

Hi
 
I'd just like to alert people to a new digital classics resource I've been working on during the evenings and weekends these past three weeks and three days.[1]
 
 
http://decommentariis.net/
 
 
It's about the creation of "crowd sourced" / "social" commentaries on ancient texts. I hate both of those terms in scare quotes but I can't think of better ones. Being literal-minded with the domain name, "a network on commentaries"? What's not to like? Click the link and find out!
 
 
The site uses CTS TEI XML from the Perseus project's 'canonical' git hub repository. Because of this the number of texts - especially Greek ones - is severely limited at the moment but I hope to get more as the texts improve in the Perseus repository and I learn more about the TEI format and better ways to parse the data out it. Because of this, I've got a some "suggested texts" linked from the home page, but you can list and view all the available texts (some that say they are available aren't in a great state though, so please be aware of that limitation! I'm a Livy scholar and there's next to no Livy in it!).
 
Technically the site uses Python 3.3, Django 1.6.2, Tastypie, lxml, html5, Twitter's Bootstrap CSS and Jquery to do it's stuff. It works OK on a phone or a tablet.  The texts are actually parsed out of the XML on the disk: the database is only used to store the list of the valid texts, some meta data about them, and any commentary items you create.
 
It's all running on a 1yr-free Amazon Web Services (AWS) site, on two instances, both "micro" in scale, a Linux EC2 instance and a Postgres RDS instance. Because of this, please don't point your class of thirty students at it - the servers won't like that much![2]
 
You have to register an account to view texts and commentaries (of which there are grand total of two test items on Eusebius 1). After you register send me an email and I will add the "make commentary" permission to your account (on my to-do list: automate those permissions).
 
You can sign up with either Google or Twitter credentials (OAuth) or just fill in the fields and put a good password in place. Please don't freak out at the "insecure" warnings your browser might warn you about. I have to use a "self-signed" certificate because at this point I'm not about to pay $200+ per year for a signed certificate.[3]
 
Other than all these various caveats, I'm pretty happy with the way it's turned out so far. Please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions.  If you want to be formal about it, there's an ability to file support issues on its the github repository - https://github.com/scotartt/commentarius/issues[https://github.com/scotartt/commentarius/issues] ... which brings me to my last point. All the source code is released with a GPL 2 licence.
 
Regards
Scot
 
[1]: thesis be damned. Sorry Janette!
 
[2]: I've got a plan to make it scale but I'm not going to implement it for a while, because $$$.
 
[3]: SSL Certificate authorities are the very definition of rentiers.
  

Scot Mcphee. 
Computer programmer. Classics PhD.p +61 412 957414
e [log in to unmask][[log in to unmask]]
w http://autonomous.org/[http://autonomous.org/]